


the light of hidden flowers

by PastelWonder



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Abduction, Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bare-knuckles Brawling, Captor-to-Lover, Conditioning, D A R K, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dominent Armitage Hux, Don't try to moralize this, F/M, Galactic Battles, Gun fights, Infantilism, Kylo Ren is Going to Die Horribly, Loss of Virginity, Mild Gore, Obsessive Armitage Hux, Personally I Can’t Wait, Size Difference, Stockholm Syndrome, That is Not How The Force Works, Totally socially irresponsible, Underage Kissing, Underage Rey, Underage Sex, Violent and Intense Scenes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2019-11-26 19:32:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 10
Words: 44,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18184799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder/pseuds/PastelWonder
Summary: General Armitage Hux finds himself unable to shake his fascination with Supreme Leader Ren's apprentice, the little Sith Rey. When the opportunity to take her lands in his lap, he does not let it go to waste..."I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers-"- Pablo Neruda





	1. Finders keepers losers weepers

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING: This is a noncon to dubcon to fullcon underage love story. If you landed here by mistake, hit that Back button to find Rux fics more suited to your tastes : )

The first time he meets her, she is covered in snow.

He finds her playing in the forest beyond Base, in her little quilted surcoat and polywoven tights, her long hair plaited into a single braid that dances behind her as she frisks about in the freshly fallen drifts that sieve through the towering pines.

She went missing over an hour ago. The Sith tore up through the galley onto the officers’ deck, looking sick with panic, and bellowed to his cabinet at-large, _Find her!_

An entire operation ground to a halt over one lost little girl.

How very like Ren.

The General recalls vividly her curious wonder at the falling snow the day she landed on Base with Leader Ren. The Sith had hulked jealously around her as he herded her into the heart of the durasteel and cement labyrinth, for what precise purpose his officers could only speculate. A pretty child, she captured the General's attention immediately, and he has since paused often to savor the memory of her smiling open-mouthed up at the sky as she marched, her dimples trembling each time a flake touched her tongue. So taken was she with the snow.

And he with her.

It therefore seemed a reasonable assumption that she had somehow managed to slip outside the compound and into the woods to play. Leaving the other officers and the Sith to their frantic searching on a hunch, he is rewarded when he spots her little boot marks leading like kitten-prints away from an open service pipe.

They lead him deep into the forest, to a small clearing far west of Base.

He pauses by the side of a titanic pine as wide as a lite-craft, watching her yip and squeal as she leaps and lands double-footed into the mounds of snow she’s set up for herself like an obstacle course.

“Come on, Rey!” her tiny chirps are easily lost against the backdrop of ancient, titanic trees and falling snow. “You can do it! Jump higher Rey, c’mon!”

Another soul might wonder why she is calling out to herself, but as a man grown up from a lonely childhood, the General understands all too well the necessity to stretch one’s own company. To make-believe.

His chest aches. He doubts very much it is from the cold.

She misses her next mound and lands on her bottom in the snow. Laughing wildly, she gathers it in handfuls and throws it as high as she can into the air above her, then tips back her chin and lets it fall onto her face.

Snowflakes drift feather-soft through the crystalline needles of the pines and settle lightly on the shoulders of his great coat. He realizes with some concern that she wears no gloves.

“Lady Rey,” he calls to her.

She startles and gasps.

Oh, but she is a lovely creature.

All pink flush and freckled nose, large doll-eyes wreathed in long dark lashes dappled with snow. Her lips, reddened and wet from being worried during her play, are parted, her breath streams out in long, lush gusts, little chest heaving with her panting as she stares up at him from the heart of her wonderland.

“Who’re you?” she asks.

“General Armitage Hux, of the ninth. My lady,” he crosses his fist over his breast and bows to her. Then he gestures out at her clearing. “May I?”

Half-suspicious, half-serious, she considers him for a long moment. Her legs still splayed out in front of her, hands braced behind, she tilts her chin and studies him from beneath her snowy lashes. His countenance makes a striking contrast with the rest of the forest, long and Imperial and black against the pale bark and crystalized needles of the pines. His hair is what shocks her most though, it seems. She stares a long time at his close, neat crop before she looks into his eyes.

Another breath, another heartbeat, and then, “Alright.”

He steps lightly inside her kingdom.

The quality of light is slightly different towards its center, purely white as it pours down with the snow from the thick, woolen sky far above the endless span of forest reaching upwards.

It must highlight further the peculiarity of his coloring, because she narrows her eyes up at him and asks, “Are you an alien?”

“No, ma’am,” he drawls, smoothly picking his way through her handiwork with hands clasped benignly behind his back. “I am human, as you are.”

His gaze is still fixed on hers, his eyes crinkled kindly in just the very corners.

If she fears him, she does not show it.

“I’m a Sith,” she pipes, pointing at her sternum with her thumb, “like my master, Lord Ren, of the Knights of Ren.”

“So I see,” his lips twitch. He stops when he is near enough to see the variegation in the color of her eyes. He hunkers down in the snow.

The sides of her steel-toed boots rap dully as she knocks them together.

“He is looking for you, your master,” he tells her quietly, watching a shadow of dismay sweep over her face, “You’ve given him quite a fright.”

She huffs. “But I don’t _want_ to do my forms. They’re so borin’-” she pleads him to understand, “I wanted to _look at_ things.”

She looks out at the forest that wraps around them like a gentle hush. Then she gathers a handful of flakes and lets them sieve between her tiny, blue-ing fingers. “I wanted to see the white-rain.”

“Oh yes, I see,” he says mildly as he works off his leather gloves.

Were she his charge, he would let her ramble through the woods that surround the perimeter of their Base, give her little pails and shovels, bright red sleds and long-haired, blue-eyed dogs to amuse herself with, teach her to make friends from stacked snow decorated with carrots and coal. He would take her to a world that is warm and let her run amuck through fields of wildflowers and paddle about in clear, shallow streams and gather shells and stones and fresh fronds. He would not keep her in battle armor, he would dress her in sheer silks and drown her in soft furs. He would kneel and kiss her little sandled feet, let her long hair fall loose over her breasts and cover her fingers in golden rings.

_Alas._

“I sympathize, my lady. Truly. However-” he directs her gaze up at the swath of sky by turning his own. Already, the clouds have begun to bruise towards night. “It shall be dark soon. You cannot stay in these forests overnight. You’ll catch your death in the cold.”

Eyes wide, she casts them uncertainly around the forest, daunted by its sudden anonymity. “But I don’t know which way I came.”

“ _That_ , little Sith, is precisely why I am here. Come,” he makes a hither gesture with the crook of his fingers before he takes one of her bare little hands between his own.

Just as he suspected, she is ice-cold.

He rubs her vigorously between his two large palms, huffing warm breath as he does, until he sees a bit of the pink return to the tips of her fingers. Then he works on his glove, helping her fingers each find their sleeves and tucking the open end into her cuff to trap the warmth. Snow falls softly all around them as he repeats his process with the other.

“It tingles,” she says. Her large, pretty eyes never stop studying his face.

His lips quirk. As if he is revealing some great secret, he tells her, “Excellent. That is how you know it is working. Now then, there we are. All ready. Up you go.”

He unfolds to his feet, drawing her with him.

She lays her newly gloved hands on his chest and looks around at the forest. “But how will you know which way?”

The cold bites his cheeks and tightens the skin around his knuckles.

 _She is quite a tough little thing_ , he thinks, letting his eyes wander over her features. He resists the temptation to take her slight waist between his two hands.

But only just.

“Simple,” he shrugs out of his great coat. It takes his warmth with it, as instantly the chill begins to seep through his uniform.

He holds it open for her so that she may worm her hands through the sleeves one-by-one. “Shall I teach you as we go?”

She pinches the lapels closed at her neck and rubs her nose into his collar before she nods.

It is a long march back to Base.

Her stride is shorter than his, footsteps less sure in the fast-fading light that falls through the canopy of crystal needles above. A mean wind creaks the branches and causes thick, heavy intervals of snow to fall like water poured out from a pail. He shortens his gait and gathers her close to his side, sheltering her beneath his arm until her progress begins to flag. Her eyelids droop, her boots drag along the snow and catch so that she stumbles.

She is exhausted, poor girl.

“There-there, now,” he stoops to lift her up into his arms. Bundled like a babe inside his great coat, she weighs next to nothing. “It won’t be long.”

“Mm,” she hums, eyes already closed, so trusting as she winds her small arms about his neck.

How easy it would be, to spirit her away. Take an unmarked lite-craft from the auxiliary hanger and set a course for a small, lush world in an unchartered system. Somewhere the Sith will never find them, where he can nurture and tend to her. Somewhere he can coax his little bud to bloom.

He is sorely tempted.

His heart begins to pound as they approach the outer perimeter. Blinding shafts of blue light from the guard towers rove slowly over the base, he hears the shouts of Stormtroopers and the rapid-fire barks of search dogs.

His mouth is dry, rasped by his warm breath that streams out over her as he slows his elegant stride. In the trench that leads up to the first row of fencing around Base, he stops to consider.

If he is caught, his life is forfeit. But if he succeeds-

The faraway lights cast pale shadows across her face cradled against his chest. His blood thrums.

He turns sharply towards the auxiliary hanger.


	2. In the most delightful way...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rape

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you have a heart condition, high blood pressure, or an inability to distinguish fantasy from fact, you should not ride this ride. Children, please exit the car to your left. All other passengers, store any loose items or personal belongings in the seat pocket in front of you.
> 
> Enjoy the ride!

She sleeps as they sail through the stars.

He sets their course for Alyseaa, an abandoned world in the Western reaches of the Galaxy, far away from Ren, and undresses down to his dress shirt and slacks. His fingers slightly tremble as he hangs his uniform jacket together with his great coat inside the refresher’s small adjacent wardrobe and locks his rapier and blaster in a cupboard above the cockpit. He chides himself for having the nerves of a silly schoolboy in first love.

He cannot help it.

He has wanted her for so long.

Heart thrumming, he kneels silently by her bedside. To watch her sleep.

“Hello, my darling,” he whispers. Slowly, ever-so-softly, his fingertip draws back a lock of hair from her cheek. The corners of his eyes crease with a tender smile. “My precious girl. Together at last.”

From the moment he first laid eyes on her, a beautiful little angel stranded on a desert planet, sun-chaffed and suspicious yet shining with hope, he has loved her. Wildly. Wickedly.

Violently.

All this time, he’s watched over her. From recesses and overhangs, alone in front of his monitors inside his chambers and from behind his steepled fingers over conference tables on the rare occasions the Sith permitted her to attend meetings. Secret glances at her bent sweetly over her colorless pictures, charcoal pencil clamped inelegantly in her small, slender fingers, and at her murmuring naps taken in some corner from a chair Ren tucks there when she grows too tired to sit at the long table and draw. He has cherished her profile and chased after her shadow, he has counted holy whatever ground she walks upon.

Now, she is here. Laid out before him like a sleeping suckling lamb on the altar, nestled in the cabin’s single recessed bunk. She still lies just how he placed her, without her surcoat or tights or bindings, without her underclothes, with the cover drawn up to her waist. On her side with her little legs stacked, hair loose from its plait draping past her shoulder over her bare breasts, palms pressed together beneath her cheek as if in prayer. Her small, full lips parted-

He traces feather-light their seam with the soft pad of his thumb, before he leans over the edge of the bed where he kneels beside it and presses his mouth to hers. He can taste her breath, innocent and sweet, on his tongue.

His cock is raging.

But nevermind that, for now.

 _She is so perfect,_ he thinks, as his hand makes another spectral pass over her profile, following the shallow hills and valleys of her body from head-to-toe. _More perfect than my dreams…_

Oh, how he has dreamed.

In wakefulness and in slumber, but most of all in that tender, twilit time in-between. Thick, veined length in hand, he’s spent hours weaving the snips and pieces he’s collected into a tapestry of sweet, dark, sensual scenes. Of her chaining him crowns of wildflowers and kissing his fingertips before they draw over her bare breasts and squirming whimpering impaled on his cock. _No Armitage, please- it’s too big…_

Such dark, lovely fantasies he shall soon make a reality.

Their reality.

“My sweet love,” he cradles the swell of her hip in his broad hand and dips to steal another kiss from her lips.

Her lashes, curled long and lush against her cheeks, flicker gently. She takes a long, shuddering sigh that drenches his face in warm breath and opens her eyes.

“Master Ren?”

“No, darling,” another ghostly pass of his hand over her form. Firmer this time, “it’s just us now.”

_Exactly how it should be._

“Hm-mmm…” she raises her fists long above her head and stretches, arching her back like a kitten’s, little belly curving outward and toes cracking faintly beneath the covers. Her tiny breasts glory in the low, blue glow of the ship’s lights.

Desire twists his guts.

The sheets make a hushed sound as she rubs her thighs together, drawing his eyes briefly to her sex hidden within them. Her hands float down to rest upon his shoulders. Her eyes are open, but only half.

With her waist taken tenderly between his two hands, he helps her sit up.

“There we are,” he speaks softly, so as not to startle away the dreamy peace that lingers from her slumber. Sweet, scented warmth rises from her taut, smooth skin and envelopes him. His pulse pounds in his throat. “Did you sleep alright, my dove?”

“Yeah,” she stretches again, and yawns. Her feet fall slowly over the edge of the bed but do not touch the floor. Where he is kneeling in front of her, she is just a bit taller than he while sitting up.

She shows no shame in her nakedness, a distinctly Jakkuvian lack of proprietary, born from their indigenous desert culture. One he relishes as she continues to hold his shoulders, unabashed of her bare breasts in his face, and pipes, “Have you seen my Master, Mistah Hux?”

“General Hux, my dear. But you-” he taps lightly at the tip of her nose, smiling, “must call me Armitage.”

“Ahm’tage, then,” she christens him impatiently. Her waist tilts in his hands as she leans to peer around him into the hull. “Have you seen my Master?”

Her annoyance is so very charming.

“Oh, he is very far from here,” he studies her reaction.

For the first time since she awoke, she notices his nearness, and seems to take in the fact that she is fully naked beneath her bedsheet, while he is not. She looks down into his eyes, then at his hands wrapped around her little belly, so slight that his long fingers nearly touch in front and back. A delicious set of emotions make a fleeting dash across her face.

Surprise. Confusion.

Fear.

She swallows. “Wh- where is he?”

He smiles so deeply it creases the skin around his eyes. _Such a darling, darling girl._ “You needn’t worry about him, my angel. I am taking you someplace safe- someplace _wonderful_.”

“Some… place… wonderful…” she repeats slowly. Her breath catches and flutters, she tries subtly to wriggle back from his grip, deeper into the recessed bunk.

His heart roars behind his ribs as he rises, so that their faces are level, and pulls her back to the edge of the bed.

“Oh yes,” he whispers, “I am taking you somewhere _very_ special. Somewhere we can revel in our love.”

“In our-” her eyes widen, her tongue catches on the sudden dryness of the roof of her mouth. She begins to pant softly. “I- I don’t know you-”

“Of course you do,” he soothes her, _Silly girl_ , still holding her firm by the waist as he strokes his knuckles along her cheek, then cups the back of her head. His fingers thread through her warm, silken hair.

“Shh, don’t be afraid,” he croons softly, smiling and shaking his head in the most tender chide when she tries to buck away. His hand in her hair wrings her gently. “It’s alright.”

In what little overhead light from the cabin filters under the recess and past his bulk, he sees her eyes beginning to gloss. His cock twitches at the thought of her tears on his tongue. “I could never hurt you.”

Her lip trembles. She squirms and stammers, “You- you’re not allowed to- my Master says-”

He kisses her.

With her wet lips already parted, his tongue slips seamlessly into her mouth. Her taste is exquisite, innocence and uncertainty, tenderness and salt. She bleats and squirms, the heels of her hands pushing ineffectually at his shoulders, her knees scrambling on either side of his hips as she tries hopelessly for leverage. His hand in her hair and on her belly hold her steady as he shows her with long, slick strokes of his thick tongue inside her what he intends do to her next.

Easily, he bears her back down onto the bed.

The recess is just large enough to accommodate their bodies, hers pressed down into the bedding and his on all fours above her. It is unbearably romantic, the two of them cocooned inside a little dimly-lit love nest, consummating the tender bloom of their love. His chest aches with the poignancy of the moment as her feet kick frantically in the tangled sheets.

“Hush, _hush_ ,” he unwinds his fingers from her soft mass of dark hair and catches both her wrists in a gentle grip. He laces their hands together, her little fingertips turning white from how hard she squeezes back at the skin between his knuckles, and presses them into the bedding beside her head.

She is flushed and trembling violently. The bedding has fallen completely from her body, baring to him that smooth, hairless mound of pink, tender flesh between her thighs split open by the breadth of his hips.

Soft, blue-hued light laps at her body from the opening of the bunk, making her skin glow. Her little belly concaves as it flexes, the tendons in her neck and in her arms stand taut. Her teeth are bared to him, mouth open with her rapid panting. Her cheeks are streaked erratically by her tears that tremble like bits of diamond in her long, dark lashes.

This moment is more beautiful than he ever could have dreamed.

“ _Please_ ,” she sobs, every line in her young, smooth face creasing with fear, “please get off me. Lemme go-”

“My sweet child.” He dips to nuzzle her nose, careful to carry his own weight on his knees and elbows. As he’d hoped for, she flinches away from him, turning her head and baring to him his true aim.

Her long, slender neck.

He licks his lips to wet them, and then touches them to that tender, sensitive flesh.

She shrieks and thrashes.

 _Softly, softly,_ he chides himself, as his gut roils with violent want, _Love her gently_.

She is still so delicate and small.

His grip on her hands relaxes. He whispers into her ear. “There-there, my love.”

Very slowly, he works the juncture of her neck and shoulder and the taut, sweet spot just below her ear, where the nerves are most concentrated for pleasure, with lush kisses and hot, fat drags of his tongue. When he feels her blood draw to the surface, warming his lips, he blows his breath in long, cool, sensual spools over her wet flesh.

She makes a strangled, pitiful keening sound. Her vicious kicks become less constant, more sporadic. Her furious straining at his hands pinning hers to the bed begins to slack.

Her senses are confused, and she is reaching exhaustion.

“No,” she whines, panting like a little bitch in first heat as he worries her nerves between his lips, “no-uhn…”

His big body shelters her from the Galaxy, making this moment intimate and small. She is not on stage here with him, she is not in any danger at all.

“Be still, my sweet,” he trails soft-lipped kisses from her shoulder to her throat, “Let me love you. That’s it, that’s my girl-”

She renews her struggle, only this time it’s weak and cheated by her tremors.

“I know, I know,” tenderly, he gathers both of her wrists in a single hand. He is soaked in a layer of sweat that makes his shirt and slacks slide across his skin. His cock is throbbing, aching, his gut is so tight with anticipation that he cannot breathe but for shallow, ragged pants. It is exhilarating, teetering so close to the edge of destruction. To feel reckless and feral.

It is her alchemy, the power she possesses over his soul. To rearrange him, to make him wanton and bestial.

And he, to tame her.

He tastes her tears as his tongue glides over her cheek and his hand skates down her body, pausing to fondle her wherever he pleases, savoring the firm ridges of her ribcage and the suppleness of her young breast. Like he, she is drenched in warm, slick sweat.

It collects on the small, soft undersides of her breasts and in the sweet dip of her navel, on the backs of her knees he hitches higher up his hip and along the insides of her thighs. He trails his fingertips all over her body, just a light, tickling touch.

“My angel,” he calls her, lifting his head to look at her.

Their eyes finds each other through the low, intimate light.

“Don’t,” her breath warbles, as his hand moves lower, over her pebbled nipples, past her clenched, panting belly, and brushes for the first time against her mound. Her face creases with another soft, whimpering sob, “Please stop-”

His thumb barely strums her slit.

She is soaking,  _sopping_ wet.

He smiles, just a quarter-smile, and hums. “Mm. I thought so.”

Gently, his fingers peel her little lips apart.

“Oh my. _My_ my my,” his murmur vibrates his chest as her breathing rasps and stops.

She is all pink swollen flesh and tiny, glistening opening. Her small hooded clitoris strains and throbs.

“What a beautiful little cunny,” he whispers. He kisses her forehead before shifting to study her more closely. His thumb trails again through her open seam.

When he tickles lightly at her entrance with the tip of his index finger, it gulps at him.

She gasps and mewls in distress.

“So needy, I know,” he circles again at her opening, pressing without penetrating, as his thumb travels up her folds, gathering slickness, to mimic the motion around her clitoris.

Her wrists are still bound by his hand directly above her, her elbows slightly bent to keep her arms from getting tired. He only wishes to restrain her from hurting herself in her struggle, not to tie her down for his pleasure.

Not for their first time.

Slowly, carefully, he settles down over and beside her, using his long legs and sidebody to keep her pinned to the bed. His hand at her sex redirects itself, winding under her sweat-slicked, trembling thigh to hold her parted as his fingertips draw softly all over her vulva, coaxing the blood to the surface, increasing her sensation. He lays his cheek against hers, smooth and silken where his is taut and covered in a very fine layer of stubble. He presses tender, sweetheart kisses to the corner of her mouth and to her throat as once again, he peels apart her folds. His thumb and forefinger find their positions on her slick, throbbing little sex.

She mews and squirms as he touches her, working her back to aching pleasure. His tongue and lips, wet and plump from kissing her, glide over her skin, trailing sweet sensation across her nerves.

“Little girl,” he speaks directly into her ear, calling to her as one coaxes a small bird from an open window into a gilded cage. His purr is deep and hypnotizing, velvet-soft. “Do you know how long I’ve watched you touch yourself, alone inside your rooms. In your baths-”

Her breath hitches with a quiet sob.

“Shhh, don’t be afraid. I’m not angry, little girl. On the contrary-” his thick, long finger presses slowly inside her to the sound of her weeping gasp. He draws a soft hiss through his teeth and sighs, letting his hot breath tingle down her spine. “I loved watching you touch yourself. You’re so beautiful, so tight…”

His finger inside her begins to stroke. Vaguely, he can sense the thin barrier of fragile skin that is her purity, and something vicious and maiming and devoted unfurls snarling inside his chest.

She is whole. And wholly _his_.

“Such a good girl,” he praises, liquid-soft. His lips are flush against her ear. Through his hooded eyes, down the length of her glistening, blue-lit body, he can see her tummy flex and roil with contractions, her hips wriggle side-to-side. She is frightened and overstimulated, she is desperate to get away, and aching to come.

She is more perfect than he ever, _ever_ imagined.

His finger inside her small body makes a wet, succulent sound as he works her, thumb circling directly now on that swollen pearl of pleasure. Firm and slow. Firm and slow.

She bleats up at the roof of the bunk.

“Did you wait for me, my angel,” as the walls of her cunt grab his finger and try to drag him deeper, he kisses her fluttering, throbbing pulse. “I’m here now. Come to me, my sweet.”

The muscles in her belly tense and tremble. Her eyes pinch shut, she lifts her hips in a tuneless rhythm over and over off the bed.

“Uhn,” she cries on her sweet exhales, “uhn… uhn…”

Rushing, she is rushing up to the edge of her pleasure.

He is there to meet her with open arms.

“Come, my baby,” he kisses her cheek, “Come right now.”

She does, shuddering and whining, drawn taut like a bow and quaking all over. She tips her head back into the pillow and opens her mouth and comes.

Like a contact-intoxication, bliss wells up through his soul.

She cries softly as she comes down, a broken, defeated little torrent of soft bleats. A frightened little lamb looking for its tether as the forest grows dark.

He has it right here for her, he thinks, as he shifts over her onto his knees and unfastens his belt.

Wrists no longer in his grasp, her hands come down to hide her heart behind her loose fists. Her eyes are still shut as he works the button fastenings on his shirt. She does not open them, not even when his clothes rustle and fall to the corrugated durasteel floor beyond the bunker.

Fully nude, he kneels over her on his hands and knees and savors her vulnerable size.

His cock is so hard it strains away from his body, veins thick and pulsing, pre-come leaking from its tip onto her belly. From its base pressed at her vulva, its length reaches past her belly button. Its girth is as wide as her wrist.

Between his legs, his sac hangs hot and heavy, buzzing with anticipation. He takes the backs of her knees into his hands.

She pinches her shut eyes and bares her clenched teeth, squeezes her fists so hard her knuckles turn white.

 _Not like this_ , his heart whispers.

“Rey-”

The sound of her name spoken so tenderly makes her lashes flicker. She takes a deep, stuttering breath and opens her eyes.

She can just make him out in the cool, dim lighting. Her eyes widen, she moans with fear and quakes so hard she jerks.

He lowers himself over her onto his forearms until their bare bodies touch. The first kiss of their skin is electric, hot and wet with sweat. They both startle at the contact, he moaning as she gasps like she’s going under water. His hand coaxes her clenched fists around his neck, he dapples her face in soft kisses as her thighs strain wide across his hips.

He takes her wholly into his arms.

His hips saw, dragging his cock through her tight, tiny folds as he presses his face into her neck. She clings to him, chanting terror-filled, near-silent pleas up at the ceiling, a continual whispering stream of “no please don’t stop”. He shifts, adjusting to align his cockhead with her small, gripping opening.

Her low, agonized wail in his ear as he forces himself into her is something he will never forgot.

She is unbearably, indescribably tight. Her soft flesh resists then splits open to him, the delicate veil of her virginity tears and gives way to his girth with a loud, raking cry from her chest. He feels drunk off the sensation of her muscles gripping and pulling and pushing at him, of her small bud forced open under his cruel press. His ears ring, his vision darkens at its outer corners. His heart beats discordant in every inch of him all at once.

“God,” he gasps in her ear, surrendering to a full-bodied shudder, as she wails her sobs, “God in heaven-”

On Arkanis, it is the tradition of patriarchs to take their brides in this manner. By sheer brute force. It is a sign of worthiness, of possessing the prowess to protect and to provide for their family, present and future. It is also the flesh and blood metaphor for their sacred marital roles. The man above, strong and guiding. The woman underneath.

But he had no idea it would feel so holy. That he would feel so utterly _complete_.

“Oh my darling,” he breathes into her ear. He gathers her closer still, one of his arms behind her back cradling her head in his hand. The other beneath her hips, angling her to take him all the way to her womb. Belly to belly. Chest to chest.

Heart to heart.

Warmth rushes over his cock, her slick mixed with her blood. It soaks the fine copper hairs at the base of his cock and runs down the tops of his thighs. He holds her tighter and fucks her faster, so close to his own completion, nose buried in her neck and eyes squeezed blissfully shut.

She lies limp in his arms and sobs like a broken thing.

“So good,” he praises her, heart lifting high from his chest to touch the stars blurred by hyperspeed all around them. “Such a good… little cunt… good… little girl…”

With his arm behind her hips, he begins to drag her down to meet him. Their flesh slaps, fast and lewd and wet. His balls beat hard against her ass. She makes choked, strangling noises and small, softening wails.

His hand at the back of her head winds into her hair.

“Beg me to,” he thinks he’s whispering as he fucks into her viciously. When in fact, he is snarling through clenched teeth into her ear, “Beg me to come in your little cunt-”

“Pah-ha- Pah-ha-lease-” she is too hysterical to speak.

He wrings her harder, fucks her faster, feels his orgasm beating down the door behind his eyes and at the base of his spine.

“Pah-lease c-come i-i-in me…”

His world stacks and draws quivering like a string, then snaps.

He presses as deep as he can against her cervix as he swells and throbs.

He paints her womb in his come.

A sort of peace floats over him, a gentle reassurance that all is finally right with the Galaxy as he falls heavy onto his side with his cock still fully sheathed inside her, taking her with him. Enveloping her in his arms.

“Shh-shh-shh,” he strokes her hair, kisses her forehead, soothing her uncontrollable weeping with his big, warm hands and tender touch. “It won’t always hurt this way, my love. Just the first… first time…”

Soft white static washes all over him, tingling and sweet. Making him new.

He finally has her. His other.

His wife.

“Just the first time. You were so brave, my angel. So perfect… my perfect… perfect girl…”

His happiness carries him off to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah man, I had forgotten how much I enjoy writing noncon. 
> 
> Boy, Master Ren is not gonna like this. 
> 
> Let's go again, shall we?


	3. Daddy finger, Daddy finger, where are you? [masculine voice] Here I am, here I am. How do you do?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little POV change, if you will. Also, more rape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, dollies. I updated the taggity waggities to reflect "violent and intense scenes" and "mild gore". Just wanted to highlight that 'case you missed it.
> 
> <3 Pastel

_“Sir…”_

Where he kneels in total darkness, head bowed, arm crossed over his thigh, leather fist clenched loosely, Supreme Leader Ren angles his head to listen.

_…love gone she is weeping shattered pieces bleeding stars enemy hisses sinks his teeth into her thigh…_

_“S-sir?"_ there it is again. A voice speaking over the intercom, _"There’s… something you need to see…”_

_…soft soul slipping through our fingers she is lost…_

Slowly, he surfaces from his communion with the Dark.

“Show me,” he says over his shoulder, so that the microphone will hear.

_"Right away, sir."_

 

 

 

 

 

The greatest amongst Ren's officers and cabinet members, General Hux’s chambers are rich and vast. That alone is what tipped off Lieutenant Mitaka. He stands in the darkened doorway of what is the General's personal office with a holopad trembling visibly from his loose grasp. A three-dimensional grid representation of the room rotates benignly above its screen. Its blueprint is twice the room's visible size.

Ren lurks inside. There is a desk, crisply organized, with two standard monitors and a latex keyboard. Anonymous shelves full of carefully catalogued rare reed- and linen-paper tomes line the walls. Medals and ceremonial sashes pressed and pinned in glass cases are set amongst them. There is a single, spanning viewport, narrow and long, behind his tall leather desk chair.

Nothing else.

Except that to Ren’s right, a section of the dark wall paneling the breadth of two men is smoldering. It’s been seared by soldering guns off the wall.

Through the rectangular gap, a recess as deep as Ren’s reach is lit by the eerie, green-hued glow of a dozen smaller auxiliary monitors. They are connected to a surge protector by long, neatly-tethered cables. Industrial, nonstandard. They disappear into a clean cutout in the sidewall.

His mouth is painfully dry, breathing ragged, and shallow. Still more cold sensation leaches outward from his chest and burns through his gut and shoulders. Adrenaline tingles in his fingers and in his soles. He hasn’t blinked in minutes.

Time has stopped.

She is everywhere. _Everywhere._ Naked. Sleeping. Bathing. Eating. Practicing her forms. She is playing with her paintbrushes and brushing out her hair.

She is touching herself, thighs spread, on top of her bedcovers. Eyes pinched, head tipped back. Fingers sluicing through her cunt.

_So this is what it feels like to die._

From the doorway, the lieutenant’s lip twitches. Once. Twice. He has to force himself to speak.

“We- discovered that he ha-hacked the feedback from both the m-m-monitors in her cha-”

“Stop.” Ren licks his lips and swallows. His heart is out of his body, beating somewhere on the ceiling. His eyes burn. “Stop speaking.”

He turns.

The holopad drops to the polished, impeccable tile and shatters, scattering slivers of black mirror like a galaxy being born as the lieutenant flinches into himself and shrieks.

He is dead before he hits the floor.

Ren stares down unseeingly at the lieutenant's heart now inside his outstretched hand. Warm and still seeping, it gives one last involuntary pulse.

He crushes it in his fist until it squelches between his fingers and drips onto the floor.  

“Phasma.”

His captain steps coolly over the threshold into the ever-expanding pool of inky vermillion spreading out from the black gape in the lieutenant’s chest.

“Sir.” Her head cocks. Like a vulture eying a carcass from its swooping circle above, she takes in the screens behind him.

“Well,” her tone is dispassionate. Wry. “It seems he did not take her for political purposes, after all. It is _personal interest_ , rather." She looks at him. "How unlike Hux.”

Ren’s guts twist, his lungs shake. He can’t breathe he can’t breathe _he can’t breathe-_

 _“Find them,”_ he snarls. A ravening, grizzly sound that saws up through the anguish that engulfs him like flames. His chest heaves.

He erupts.

_“Find them now!”_

His roars and the great metallic groans of yielding equipment and shrill shatter of monitors follow the Captain’s solemn stride back out into the hall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first sound she hears is her own breathing.

It sieves out over her palate in short, punching huffs. Her tongue feels heavy, thick and dry. She cannot close her mouth.

Her eyes roll behind her flickering eyelids. She can’t keep them open, either.

The next thing she hears is _his_ breath, fast and ragged and wet. Right in her ear. She feels it, too. Lush, humid heat on her cheek and neck. His tongue glides slick across her skin.

_“There’s a good girl.”_

She can’t move her arms.

Oh, because they're pinned behind her. Crossed overlapping at her mid-back. He clenches their intersection in one big hand to hold her still.

His other strokes back her hair.

“What about now, my angel?” his voice is getting closer, filtering back to her through the thick haze that coats her mind. Like she’s surfacing from underwater, his soft, vague murmurs become panting and sharp, “-have we learned our lesson now? We do not _bite,_ we do not _spit_ -”

With a sickening lurch, like the sensation of freefalling, she senses the furious bounce of her body lain prone on the bed, punctuated by her hard huffs and his deadly soft words.

He’s fucking her. Again.

_Oh joy._

His long, muscular legs are wedged between her spread thighs, she can feel their long, soft hairs drag wetly through her slick and his come. Sweat pooling between her breasts and underneath her belly make her slip along the sheets as he takes her draped over her body with his weight on his forearm braced on the bed above her head.

_In-out in-out pounding pounding pounding_

She hears him moan.

The low blue lights from inside the cabin illuminate the fine fire-colored hairs along his arm, turning them translucent, like see-through strands of gold. His muscles flex, long corded tendons straining up against his pale flesh as his hand fists the sheets.

She squeezes her eyes shut while he buries his face in the crook of her neck and comes.

Between her legs is dull and throbbing, she can no longer feel the details of his hard, huge, ridged cock thrusting through her, tearing her apart.

But she feels this, the ballooning and then the throb, her sore, swollen insides coated in thick, rushing warmth.

It’s the only part that’s soothing, because it signals the end of a round.

She counts seven altogether. The ones she’s been conscious for, at least. She can’t tell over how many hours, the individual granules of time are all sifted together.

His energy is endless, she knows that-

Soft, sensual sounds trickle into her awareness. The tender dapple of sensation over her bare, sweat-slicked back.

He is dotting her in kisses.

_Sick fuckin’ happabore-fucker-_

She hisses and squirms weakly in his grasp.

He puffs in her ear, a soft, affectionate laugh. “Will you ever learn?”

With one last lingering kiss to her shoulder, he flexes his arm and rises up off her onto his knees. Cool air rushes between their bodies, coupled with the slow, gentle drag of his cock leaving her and the hot slush of his come that follows it, making her shudder.

“There now. All done,” he strokes her, long, gentle draws of his warm hand down her back. Then he moves from between her legs and turns her over as if she weighs nothing. As if she were a doll.

Blood rushes tingling back into her fingertips. Her heart aches from throbbing constantly behind her ribs.

She covers her face with her hands and sobs.

“I know, I know,” he soothes. His voice is so soft, whispery and tender. Always, _always_ after he’s done, he winds her arms around his neck and holds her. Skin-to-skin.

He kisses her mouth.

She hates, hates, _hates_ how much it comforts her. His words. His kisses. His touch. In the lead-up, it’s sickening, terrifying. She feels cornered. Trapped like an animal he’s snatched from the sand by its neck. And when he pins her, bears down and presses in-

The shame and ache overwhelm her.

She clings to his neck and cries harder.

He cradles and rocks her, big warm hand reassuring as it smooths down her hair. His come dribbles out of her onto the bedsheet and smears her thighs.

“There’s no other way, my love,” he kisses her crown, lulls her sweetly. Back and forth. Back and forth. “I wish there was. I wish there was…”

He holds her until she cries herself out.

Her head throbs, too much pressure in her forehead and around her eyes as he tips up her chin and pecks a soft kiss to the tip of her nose.

She stares unblinking into his eyes.

Blue. They are absolutely, violently blue.

“Let’s have a bite to eat, shall we?”

She hates when he lets her go.

 _Weak,_ Ren snarls from some lightless corner of her mind, _failure. You’re nothing._

In her mind’s eye, she starts thrashing as soon as he tries to lift her. Nails raking, teeth gnashing, punching and kicking and screaming and ripping out his hair.

But in reality, she doesn’t move at all.

 

 

 

 

“Open…”

Teeth clenched shut, she squinches her eyes at the floor and glowers.

She’s seated in his lap, bum on one hard, muscular thigh, legs draped over the other and pressed together tight. Her arms are crossed defensively around her middle to stave off unwanted tickles, she’s wearing his button down he dressed her in and nothing else. He’s got on a just pair of dark slacks and his watch.

She wishes he’d wear more. She’s sick to Kriff of looking at him.

He rubs his forehead with his thumb not holding the spoon and sighs. “My dear-”

“I ain’t your _dear_ ,” she snaps suddenly, baring her small, white teeth.

It surprises them both.

Usually, she doesn’t speak.

“Well well,” he sets the mouthful of warm, fragrant ration elegantly on their shared plate and rings his arms around her waist. His hands lace together over her hip, he bounces his knee. The motion makes her sore little cunny ache like anything. “At long last. She speaks.”

She turns her head away from him and snorts.

Never in her life had she dreamed it possible to hate a Master more than she hated ol’ Plutt. The rudely porge-fucker who made her short life a living hell as she toiled under the blistering sneer of the Jakkuvian sun. Beat her viciously for so much as rolling her eyes behind his back. Called her _useless_ and _stupid_ and _lazy cunt._ Made her sleep out under the moon on a mat like a dog.

Then she met Kylo Ren.

Oh boy, did she loathe his guts.

Always looming over and snarling like a hungry beast, grabbing her by the scruff and shaking her, yanking her by her tender arm this way and that. He was always, always raging, except when he was giving her his empty, stupid, melancholy stare.

The first thing he ever told her, sat down all alone in his slick Imperial ship, her wrapped up in rags and chaffing sand, him in rich, perfect black, is that her family whom she’d waited for all her life were dead. Buried in paupers’ graves in the Jakku desert, less than ten clicks from where she’d slaved away for Plutt. They were nobody, he said to her, with something like hatred for them burning in his lightless eyes. Filthy drunks.

 _“You have no place in this story. You’re nothing,”_ he told her. Then he reached across the table, “ _But not to me.”_

She’d never felt so sick or more ashamed of herself in her life. She’d never felt so utterly alone.

He sat silently and watched her cry.

Then he locked her up in a dark, cold labyrinth and threw away the key.

 _A new order to the Galaxy,_ that was her destiny. She belonged by his side.

A load of shaak shit, that was. She was a prisoner. At least with Plutt, she could go outside. Play her games, tell herself stories, have her ‘ventures. Live some kind of life.

Kylo Ren was the worst Master she’d ever heard of. Until she met this man.

Ahm’tage Hux.

What a sick, lunatic bastard. What a murderous snake.

“Rey,” he drawls patiently.

She grinds her teeth together, digs her fists into her ribs, and says nothing.

He jiggles her again, kissing her temple when she winces. There’s a small sliver under his left eye that’s healing, a dark bruise on his lip from her bite. Red welts from her fingernails crisscross his bone-white arms and chest. She’s clawed his back to shit, she knows that. “Would you like to try something else? A different flavor, perhaps?”

“I'd like,” she starts primly, quietly, seething at the floor, “to blow your brains out. All over this ship. ’ow bout that?”

“I see,” she _hates_ how amused he sounds. “You know-”

He leans back against the headrest of the captain's chair and smirks up at the ceiling, as if remembering something fond, “My father’s wife tried to knife him to death with a kitchen blade. Or so the story goes. And my grandmother, paternal, allegedly did not speak a word to my grandfather for their first three months.”

Her breath catches imagining the horror of it. Tears for those poor other girls and for herself well up in her eyes.

“So you come from a long line’a disgusting pig-brutes, yeah?” her voice warbles. She’s still speaking to the floor. “Hope your ma stabbed your pa to deaf and pissed on ‘is bones after the birds picked em clean.”

“Goodness. Such colorful language.”

She shuts her mouth and vows she’ll never speak to him again so long as he lives.

His lips, warm and soft and wet just at the seam, press tenderly into her shoulder.

She pinches her eyes and prays she dies. Right here, right now.

“You won’t always hate me, my angel. I know that you think that you will, and that you do now,” his hands unlace so that he can stroke her hair back from her face. “But it won’t be forever. I promise.”

Her lip trembles. Tears leach out from beneath her lashes and race each other down her cheeks.

 _Quit your snivelin’, girl,_ Plutt sneers.

 _That’s enough,_ Ren snarls.

“My poor sweetheart,” says Ahm’tage. He cradles her face to his shoulder and rubs her back. “That’s it, my darling, have it out. Have it all out.”

She clings to his neck as she sobs.

It feels like days pass before she wrings herself dry. She stays curled against him holding his shoulders, the cuffs of his long sleeves covering her hands, nose raw from weeping, eyes red. She lets him feed her from the spoon and from his fingers and sips trembling from his glass. He talks and sings to her in low, murmuring tones that vibrate like purrs inside his chest. His cold, clear eyes are strange and hypnotizing, she tries never to look into them directly.

She can see herself in their surface, and it scares her.

He takes her to the ‘fresher for a bath when it’s done.

The stall is small and claustrophobic. He helps her step in when the water’s warm enough by holding her small hand. He is so much bigger than she is, so much stronger. All lean, flexing muscle and towering stance. She’s getting tired of fighting him.

She loses, every time.

He washes her by hand rather than with a cloth, lathering up his big palms and then smoothing them over her bare, slick skin. His touch is tender yet firm, lingering and thorough. He fondles her wherever he pleases, he loves to kneel down and cup her ass and spread her cheeks with her turned away from him facing the tile. He loves to squeeze and knead her breasts, strum her nipples with his thumb before he draws them delicately into his mouth. He loves to suckle her while his big fingers slip softly through her slit, working gentle at her swollen, overwrought clit.

She whimpers and moans so much, trying not to hear herself, not to feel him. Not to come.

She loses. Every time.

“Ah-ah, gently,” he coaxes her, when afterwards she tries blindly to rake his face with her nails. He holds her hands in his with his thumbs pressed beneath her finger joints so that they cannot bend. Slowly, he drags the tips of her fingers down his face, along his chest and the flexing muscles in his belly. Over his cock.

“That’s it,” his breath bathes her face in humid heat, “Gently, my girl. Just like that.”

She stands and shakes as he dries her down.

“Such a beautiful girl,” he whispers reverently against her skin. Then he lifts her into his arms like a bride in a fairy story and carries her to bed.

Every day, at least what she thinks might be days from inside this timeless hell, he puts the bedsheets inside the cycler and remakes their bunk, so that the covers are smooth, soft and smelling of soap as he lays her down.

She’s so tired now.

Her head swims, thoughts paddling lazily through the hazy blue cabin lights, as he lies below and beside her and draws her thighs apart. There is the quiet screw of the threaded mouth of a bacta jar followed by the cool smear of ointment across her sex.

His fingers separate her lips and push into her. She’s already humiliatingly wet.

He never mocks her, never gloats at her for this. Like he knows it’s something she can’t control. Like he’s _counting_ on it being so.

He kisses her ribs straining up through her skin one-by-one and suckles lightly at her nipples while he fingers the bacta gel into her.

_In and out… in and out…_

The rich food and warm bath and her orgasms make her feel heavy and yet light. Like she’s sinking and dissolving at the same time. His mouth makes a path down her navel, lingering to love her belly button before finding her little clit at the top of her slit split open by his working hand. He laps her between praises, encouraging her soft mews and whimpers, pausing to kiss the tender inside of her elbow when her fingers wind greedily through his hair. His tongue finds the groove in her clit and lavishes there until her cunt tightens around his fast-fucking fingers and her hips dig back into the bed.

She hates him she hates him she hates him she hates-

“Ahh- ah- Ahm’ta-hage… hahn…” she's come so hard she can’t catch her breath.

So he breathes into her instead, hot slick kisses that taste like medicine and saliva and sex.

“Go to sleep, angel,” her eyes are already closed as he drags the covers up to their waists and gathers her up to his chest. She hears his heartbeat, sure and solid and strong, beneath her ear. “We land in the morning.”

Exhaustion draws her out to sleep, as the sea drags the shore into its maw.

 _Land,_ she thinks distantly. The possibilities for escape kaleidoscope through her thoughts.

She knows one thing for sure.

She needs a weapon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Armitage is a lunatic and Rey is a baby John McClain and I LOVE THEM! Don't try to change me.
> 
> Go with it. Go with iiiiiit…


	4. Take you wonder by wonder/Over, sideways and under/On a magic carpet ride

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daddy WarHux

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why- why am I like this?

The ship’s subtle lurch out of hyperspeed jolts him awake.

He peers over his shoulder through the narrow maw of their bunk, past the low-lit cabin, above the control panel inside the raised cockpit, out the ship’s single viewport at a plethora of shivering white stars. Excitement, electric and raw, niggles in his gut.

_At last._

They have arrived.

His ladylove still sleeps inside his arms. Every evening since he took her, she’s fallen asleep facing away from him, balled up over his arm anchored around her tiny middle, her arms folded defensively against her chest, knees drawn up to her elbows. But always over the course of the night, she finds her way onto her opposite side, so that they lay belly-to-belly, her small feet twined around his calf, nose nestled in the crook of his neck, hands holding his heart.

Her soul knows they are mated, even if she does not.

Softly, ever softly, he trails the tips of his fingers down the length of her spine.

She murmurs and presses closer, winding her arms about his neck.

His heart strains painfully at his ribs to meet her.

“My darling,” he whispers, voice thick from sleep. He licks his lips, clears his throat. Trapped between them, his cock is awake and throbbing, eager from the press of her warm, soft skin and the gentle puffs of her breath upon his neck.

He wants to have her again before they land. Otherwise he won’t be able to work properly, too busy trying to bed her in the long, lush grass.

At the thought of pinning her struggle amongst the feathery green and dark, fragrant soil, his cock jerks.

Again, he strums her spine and calls to her, “Rey, my angel. Time to rise.”

“Hmm-mm,” she stirs and huffs.

“Pretty girl,” his words become a hushed, tender sing-song. His fingertips draw gentle touches over her arms and along her thighs, leaving tingling sensation in their wake, “the bells are ringing, the birds are singing. Time for pretty girls to wake.”

“Mm-mmm,” she whines. Her hands behind his neck creep up above the pillows and ball, then press into her cheeks. Her head tips back, she arches into him through a deep stretch that wrings a satisfied mew from her lips.

Before she can begin her morning struggles, he kisses her. Her mouth is soft and slack from sleep.

She goes very still.

He takes his time, holding her warm sex spread over his naked thigh by his hands gripping the firm, smooth globes of her ass. This time when she has just woken is when she’s most mild, he revels in the warm, dry press of her soft skin and quiet mewling while he searches inside her with his tongue.

Gently, his cups her breasts.

In a slow, pendulous motion that times with the stroke of his tongue, he builds her pleasure with just the pads of his thumbs. The bedding makes a warm cocoon around them as her little cunny clenches and gulps, leaking hot, wet slip against his thigh.

Any moment now, she will begin to thrash and snarl. Only yesterday she raked a line beneath his eye that drew blood.

So he is surprised when, tentatively, her slender arms wind themselves around his neck and she strokes the unkempt hairs at his nape with the very tips of her fingers, feather-light.

His heart misses its next beat as she sighs softly into his mouth.

Their lips peel apart with a sensual sound, her shallow panting bathes his face in moist breath.

“Good morning, my love,” he murmurs, so close to her their noses touch.

Her eyes are hidden by her lashes, aimed at the meeting of their bodies, where her young, tender breasts press against his pale chest.

“G’morning, Ahm’tage,” she breathes.

His hearts leaps, ravening with excitement.

_So, she speaks again._

“Hello, sweet one,” he croons to her, cradling her chin and strumming her lip. He speaks softly so as not to startle away the moment. His pulse pounds in his throat. “Did you sleep well?”

She nods, then licks her lips, keeping her gaze on his chest. “H-how was your sleeping?”

“Very fine.” He nudges the tip of her nose with his own, pecks her softly on the mouth. “I dreamt of you. I took you to Arkanis, to meet my mother. You wore a blue dress. We danced while she played the piano. A waltz, I believe.”

She flinches. “Oh. Thass nice…”

“Mm,” he wraps her up in his arms, savoring her small body and the softness of the bedsheets, the glory of a morning without shrieking and clawing. “It was. You looked so beautiful. And Mother, she would have loved you, a pretty little daughter-in-law to spoil. She-”

“Ahm’tage?” her childish voice is trembling. Still, she won’t meet his eyes, “M-may you… may you kiss me, please?”

“What’s this?” his lips quirk, “A new way of shushing me?”

“No, I-” she swallows. One of her arms unwinds from his neck. Slowly, she turns her cheek. “I h-had a dream, you kissed me-” she touches the tip of her small, trembling finger to her neck and whispers, “Here.”

Oh absolutely, she is lying. It is written in every line of her face.

That does not stop him from slowly drawing back her hair to expose her smooth, pale throat, disguising his mirth in a husky murmur against her ear. “I kissed you here, my angel?”

His finger drags its breadth down the length of her neck. Her pussy gulps pitifully at his thigh.

She nods once.

“Mm, I see.”

He wets his lips and admires for a moment through the low light her creamy skin already marked by his love. Not the harsh contusions made by a fumbling brute, but delicate, overlapping blooms of pale sanguine that are specters of her pleasure. They mingle sweetly with the constellations of freckles dappled all over her body by the Jakkuvian sun.

Dipping, he traces the shape of one with his tongue.

Her breath catches, she makes a sound like a newborn kitten mewing under his tender touch.

Whatever game she might be playing with him, he works over her, thorough in pleasing her, well-versed by now in the touch she so unwillingly prefers. He worries at her in long, sensual suckles while lapping up her false submissiveness like mana, gut tightening in twisting coils of desire at her soft, prey-like sounds. His hands stroke her sides, up and down, pausing to fondle and grope her firmly, kneading her warm flesh until she whimpers and begs. Her hips have a mind of their own, riding the hard ridge of his thigh and smearing him in her hot, wet slip.

He releases her just as her cries begin to fever-pitch.

Her little rose-tipped breasts rise and fall with her fast panting, she mewls frustrated into the back of her hand pressed against her mouth. Her face is still turned away from him, he chases the rapid hollowing of her belly with his fingertips and admires her pretty distress with a burning alchemy of adoring greed.

“Ah- Ahm’tage,” she huffs. She’s flushed all over, hottest where he’s teased her with his mouth.

His big hand follows the motion of her breath, stroking her from breasts to belly in a sensual loop. He props well of his cheek on his fist. “Yes, my love?”

She pants piteously at the back wall of the bunk as her little fingers judder lightly over her crinkled nipples. “M-may you kiss me here?”

“Certainly,” he nuzzles closely at her ear, his whisper slipping down inside her to tingle at her spine, “I shall kiss you anywhere you like. I do so love to taste you.”

Her belly hollows as her breathing bottoms out.

He moves over her, coming onto his hands and knees so that his body shelters hers from the light. His back brushes the bunk’s ceiling before he lowers onto his forearms and takes her pebbled nipple into his mouth.

She gasps and cries out.

His huge, hard cock juts fiercely between their bodies, bobbing to slaver hot pre-cum along her belly. His balls dangle heavy and aching between his thighs. He grips himself in one hand and pumps smoothly, relishing the rasp of foreskin over the veins straining up along his length.

He’ll play her little game of kiss-and-seek, then he’ll take her until she hangs limp and slack-jawed from his cock.

_Naughty girl._

She tips her head back and moans as he draws deeply on her breast.

He alternates lavishing them, drawing airy, teasing circles around the nipple not in his mouth. It confuses her young body, sends blood and sensation rushing in opposite directions to overwhelm her, making her quake beneath his touch. He rocks slowly, minutely, relishing the drag of his thick sac through her soaked, quivering sex as her thighs try of their own accord to climb his. When he has worked her pleasure to a point, he releases her nipple and takes the soft, tender underside of her breast between his teeth.

The smallest prick of pain amidst a sea of ecstasy has her keening and calling his name.

“Ahm’tage!” she bleats frantically, as if she’s lost and cannot find him. Her small hands pull at his disheveled hair and scrabble at his back. “Ahm’age!”

She is soaked in sweat, it coats his tongue as he laves her flesh with long, fat laps.

“I’m here, angel,” he soothes raspingly, blowing cool breath over her skin for the pleasure of watching her shudder before he rises over her.

His forehead drifts down to meets her as softly, he kisses her mouth. Her thighs tremble around him.

“I’m right here,” his whispers, still stroking fast at his cock. His breath shakes, his length aches for the tight, lush sleeve of her body.

Slowly, with his cool blue eyes watching himself, he drags the thick, flanged head through her little slit. The sensation makes him groan, long and low, while she whimpers.

It comes away trailing her slick and glistening in their juices.

Her mouth trembles, tears seep through her lashes and slip dazzling down her cheeks to stain her hair spread out beneath her darker brown.

_Oh, my darling._

As a stone stutters uncertainly across moving waters, the tips of her fingers trail shaking almost without touching down her belly to pet her mound. Without meaning to, the back of her wrist brushes his dripping cockhead. She flinches at the hot, wet contact and draws her lip inside her mouth.

“Kiss me he-here,” she whispers, so softly he can hardly hear.

“Here?” he follows the path her hand has made with his lips, pressing plush, wet kisses down to her navel. His cock throbs, desire licks at his taut belly with forked tongues.

When he takes the backs of her thighs in his hands and sips at her little belly button, she pinches her eyes shut and quakes.

“My sweet girl,” he calls her, breath hot and humid on her sex. Through his hair stranded with sweat and hanging brightly across his eyes, he gazes up the length of her small body at her face.

Her beauty wrings his heart.

“In this dream of yours, was I not devoted to you?” he watches carefully the emotions that play across her face. Confusion, desperation. Anguish. Need. “Did I not give you what you desire, is that why you cry? Tell me.”

She hides her shame in the crook of her arm.

“Oh my love,” he presses a chaste kiss to her slit, tasting a hint of his own musk mixed with her generous, fragrant slip. She smells and tastes so good, so pure, like warm bath water and innocence and tears. It makes his heart thrash and his gut tighten with needful want. “Don’t cry, my angel. I will not abandon you. Not now, in your hour of need,” he dips closer, his gaze still on her beautiful grief, “not ever.”

Her lashes flutter, she peeks beneath her arm, her infinite eyes startled and glossy with her tears. Her mouth opens when, without blinking, he drags his tongue through her small, delicate seam.

His lips purse, he blows a long spool of cool breath over her sex.

She gasps as if she’s going underwater and clings desperately to the sheets.

“All that pretty honey,” he whispers, watching her pleasure smolder behind her golded eyes. His hands slide down her body, trailing sensual ache as over and over, he laps broadly at her seam. He does not seek to part her just yet, he knows his strokes are too generic to give her the sensation she needs. Her frustration reflects in her fast, ragged panting and complaining little mewls each time the flat of his tongue drags lightly over her clit.

When she can bear it no longer, she moans. “No…”

“No?” he raises his head, his own breathing harsh, lips glistening with her slick. His cold, clear gaze searches hers.

She shakes her head, tears slipping past her lashes down her blushing cheeks, leaving starlit streaks in their wake. Her breath quakes as her hand rides unsteadily down her trembling body to cup her little mound.

In a single, silent moment that seems to unfurl out forever around them, her small fingers peel apart her sex.

His breath stops.

“H-here,” she pets her hood with just one tremoring fingertip. Her tiny opening, pink and swollen from his rapacious affections, winks shut with a contraction. On her shaking exhale, clear, generous slip dribbles out. It drips between her round, pale cheeks.

He groans.

The sound startles her, she jars and pulses even more sweet nectar.

He draws in air through his teeth and catches the pert globes of her ass in his hands. Spreading her open, he dips and catches the dribble in a hard lap that follows from her puckered opening to the top of her seam. His tongue chases away her fingertip, drawing a tight, firm circle around her hood before his lips seal over her and he suckles, working her pearl with the rough flat of his tongue.

“Uhn-huhn-” she lets out a pitched, feral keen and bucks her hips.

He follows through with the motion, lifting her up by his hands gripped so tightly on her ass the tips of his fingers make her skin bloom white. He rises until his shoulders and the back of his bowed head meet the roof of the bunk.

Her eyes go sweetly wide, hands falling back in shock to the pillow strewn in her soft hair by either side of her face as her body folds beautifully beneath her ribcage. Her thighs clamber and hook over his shoulders, she hangs trembling half-suspended above the bed in his indomitable grasp.

“Ahm- Ahm’tage!” she wails, startled and anxious and soused in sensation as he continues his relentless assault on her pleasure. Her belly clenches and roils with violent contractions as she rushes towards her peak, “Ahm’tage…”

His lungs ache, something possessive and rankling unravels inside his chest, raking him with its overlapping, razor-tipped scales as it swells him almost to bursting. Her thighs quiver against his cheeks, the head of his cock nudges insistently between the nobs of her spine in her middle-back, smearing glistening pre-come across her hot skin.

She tries to arch inside his grip as she comes.

Her belly hollows, her ribs strain up at her skin as she tips her head back and comes strangling on her breath.

He doubles-down.

Her whole body judders with the overwhelming pleasure, she struggles weakly as he pins her ass to his chest with one strong, pale forearm full of flexing, corded veins. Her slick bathes him, making their skin slip-slide hotly as he holds her fast and uses his other hand to grope at the tender peaks of her aching breasts.

Her face creases, little mouth straining open as wide as it will go as her eyes pinch and her hands scramble at the wall behind her head.

“Ahn, ahn, _ahn_ -”

She cries out on every fast, forceful exhale, shaking belly hitching and undulating with nowhere to go as his tongue bullies her mercilessly.

Sensing she’s so near a second edge, he takes one of her pebbled nipples between his thumb and finger and tugs firmly, drawing bursting pleasure up through her overstimulated nerves.

This time, she comes _shrieking_.

He is breathless as he releases her from his suckling mouth, shaking from pent-up desire, high on how absolutely _devastated_ she looks, weeping openly and shivering, teeth chattering so violently it’s as if he’s drawn her up from freezing waters.

She is so small, so helpless to stop him as he lays her down amongst the rumpled bedding and aligns himself with her clenched opening. Her hands grasp onto his flexing biceps, she tips her head back and moans when his steel girth breaches her tender body without preamble.

Like an iron rod pushed through the bud of a rose, he forces her to bloom.

The bedsheets are twined around them, the maw to the cabin is dark, lit only by the stillborn light of the stars. There is no sound in the ship save her loud, emphatic whimpers as he strains through her hot, slick, fluttering flesh on his way to her womb. Her muscles gulp and seize around him, the sensation makes him grit and bare his teeth and snarl, _“Yes-”_

On his dragging withdraw, her eyes rolls back, she strangles on her breathing as her mouth goes slack in the prettiest pant.

He lowers himself to his forearms until they’re so close they breathe each other’s breath. His fingers thread and twist through her hair, wringing expertly to draw delicate, tingling sensation to her scalp.

She gurgles and groans out of her wide-open mouth.

“Is that good, little girl?” he breathes over her as he works himself back inside. She’s so good, so tight and so small, so perfect and untried. His balls throb, he moans along with her stuttering gasps as his hips begin to piston. “Is it what you _dreamed of?_ ”

Her body gives a hard, involuntary judder. Her sopping little cunny makes a lewd, lush squelch each time he returns.

Panting like an animal, he slips his tongue inside her open mouth.

She moans and tries to fuck back at him by hitching her hips.

He rams her cervix and wrings her hair to keep her still.

Over and over, he strokes into her, vicious and tender and demanding and cherishing, with his cock and with his tongue. She lies still and takes him, eyes open and glazed and unseeing at the low ceiling. Slip and sweat makes his chest slide smoothly over her breasts.

“Do… you… know…” he speaks through clenched teeth when he pulls back panting to admire her. Each word is punctuated by a hard, splitting thrust, “how… much… I… love… you…”

Her body tries to curl around a sob.

“Rey,” he cages her in his arms and speaks directly into her ear as he picks up pace. “My… beautiful Rey…”

She clings around his shoulder and presses her face into his neck.

“I know… it’s… overwhelming,” his lungs ache, his gut burns. His breath hitches and sighs, “You’ve gone… so long… without love. So brave, my darling- oh, God.”

He rests his forehead on the pillow beside her and tries to beat back his orgasm. It’s building, a crackling, electric drum inside his balls and at the base of his spine. His legs tense.

Heaven. She is heaven.

“So proud… to call you- my own.”

Her cunt grips, her arms cinch tighter. She wails his name up at the stars. “Ahm’tage!”

He crushes her to him, wrapping completely around her small body and grinding her down into the bed. His swollen lips presses a kiss to her cheek soaked in tears and sweat. “I love you… so much, my angel- my girl… so… fucking… much-”

Unbelievably, she comes.

It is fast and it is violent, she bucks and shrieks in his slick grasp, all her warm, wet flesh surrounding him swallowing him whole in a searing gush.

“ _Yes,”_ he growls, strong and feral and so fully alive. He squeezes her until he thinks she will break, “Come on my cock. That’s it, good girl- come all over my cock.”

She comes and comes more, jolting and babbling and choking. At last he can bear it no more.

His teeth sink into her shoulder, the first time he’s marked her, as he slams all the way to the hilt in one womb-shifting move and pours all the roaring, pent-up, glorious sensation into her like a spilling jar.

She lies completely limp beneath him, succumbing to full-body aftershocks of shuddering sensation. Her cunt continues to milk him in long, sweet drafts.

Drunk off satisfaction, he starts to shift some of his weight off of her, but she whimpers and clings and will not let go. So he rolls them onto their sides and holds her. Kissing her cheek and her neck and the delicate corner of her mouth. Stroking softly at her tangled hair.

“So good, my darling,” he whispers, voice thick and slightly hoarse. “Love you… so much… So, so much…”

He hears his heartbeat as a wave of peace crests over him.

Perhaps, he could do with another short rest before they land. They’re in no hurry, after all.

They have all the time in the Galaxy.

 

 

 

 

Several hours later, after a light nap and a satisfying bath, he dons a crisp black button-down and a pair of dark slacks, his officer’s boots and his wristwatch, and settles into the tall captain’s chair behind the ship’s main controls. Beyond them, through the viewport, Alyseaa’s treble moons turn in a graceful slow-motion ballet against the backdrop of an endless void pricked by a multitude of shimmering stars.

Over his shoulder, his little bird rests peacefully inside their nest.

He shall miss this sweet interlude, the serene feeling of being the only two in the Galaxy adrift a sea of infinite stars.

He taps the touch-panel to rouse his custom protocol program from sleep.

 _“Welcome,”_ she greets him in her smooth, anonymous voice. The status lights to her core systems flicker on. _“Please place your hand on the screen.”_

A green-glowing band of light spans the panel to map his hand. From a seamless compartment in the low graphite ceiling above, an infra scanner telescopes out with a sharp _click-snap_ to eye-level with his seat. Below its deep red lens, a small microphone waits.

_“Please look into the scanner and state your name.”_

 “Armitage Hux,” he says crisply, holding his eyes unnaturally wide for the roving red light.

There’s a two-second lapse, and then the rest of the control board, as well as the paneling scaling the wall on either side, boot up in a buzzing symphony of multicolored lights.

_“Welcome, Armitage.”_

He taps a quick series of symbols into the touch-pad, drawing up a blue-grid, three dimensional representation of Alyseaa and a legend to its left. “Andromeda-”

_“Yes?”_

“Confirm ghost-protocol has not been breached.”

He strokes his pursed fingertips over the surface of the hovering model and waits for the tell-tale shiver which means the sensors have registered his touch. When they do, he opens his hand.

The grid-planet expands, gathering topographical detail as its sidebar legend updates with statistics about the world.

_“Confirmed. Positional coordinates have been queried by the Imperial command system. No data signal was sent back.”_

_Excellent._

They are still unfound.

“Ahm’tage?”

Holding Alyseaa’s specter in the palm of his hand, he turns.

His ladylove stands uncertainly in the center of the ship, a bedsheet wrapped loosely around her small, bright body. She’s studying warily the cacophony of blinking colored lights behind him, and at the world turning above his hand.

“Ah, look who is awake,” he smiles as she rubs her eyes with her fist not clutching the sheet. “You look rested,” he savors her flushed cheeks and hair mussed from their sex, “and radiant. Love becomes you.”

She snorts.

“Thanks,” as ever, she is careful to avoid his eyes, “Whass happening? Where are we?”

He pats his knee. “Come and see.”

Her hesitation is beguiling, as is the soft, sensual rustle of the sheet on the stamped durasteel beneath her bare feet as she shuffles up to the cockpit, her gaze shifting suspiciously between him and the lights.

When she is close enough, he takes her little hand and guides her into his lap.

“Andromeda-” he speaks generally at the controls as she settles gingerly into his embrace. His arm winds possessively around her waist, “meet my wife, Rey of Jakku.”

_“Hello- Rey of Jakku.”_

Startled, she scans around the viewport, not knowing where to direct her speech, “H-hello, An-Anromeena…”

“Andromeda,” he sounds out for her, “she is a transferable, terminal-less integrated command-protocol I modeled after the First Order’s _Omega_ program. With a few modifications, of course.”

“Wait- you _made_ her? Like, from scratch?” she twists in his grip, gaping. Her eyes take in the control board over her shoulder with skeptical awe, “You? Built a protocol? To fly this ship? From scratch?”

“This ship, and over a thousand other models.”

“A thousand?” her eyes narrow, “What, are you like a genius or somethin’?”

His chest swells with savage pride.

He demurs with a smirk. “Hardly.”

Her expression suddenly becomes very wary. “But does Kylo Ren know where we are?”

It is a petty victory really, that she prefers him to the Sith. He relishes it all the same.

“Not at all. Andromeda functions fully independently of the Order’s mainframe and cannot be overridden. I designed her to be untraceable.”

“How? How _did_ you make her?” she whispers, reaching up her fingertip to trail wonderingly the edge of Alyseaa’s legend. The pixels ripple then remerge.

“Very carefully,” he murmurs into her ear, “Now-”

He takes her wrist, draws her fingers lightly over the rotating image to reengage the sensors. It shivers in response to her touch.

He tilts his chin so that he may admire her pretty profile as he asks, “Would you like to choose where we land?”

Shyly, she chews her lip and nods.

He bounces his knee and claps her little belly twice. “Andromeda- show possible landing sites near bodies of fresh water. Level clearings, thirty-by-thirty meters at least. Away from the tree lines, if you please,” he adds.

Pale blue light strobes the cabin and illuminates their skin as the grid-planet expands and contracts, rotates and spins. Statistics scroll the legend too rapidly for him to read.

_“I found three sites that match your criteria-”_

Rey’s breath catches and holds as the globe suddenly splices into three sections that separate and spread, morphing into a pixelated picture of the sites at ground level. They can make out the shapes of plains, mountains and trees, and of wildlife grazing benignly amongst the grass.

“Ahm’tage,” she whispers, straining in his lap to see her new world in blue graph, “this is magic.”

In this moment, she’s forgotten she hates him.

He wraps her up in both his arms and kisses her neck. Her heart beats a beautiful drum beneath his thumb. “Tell me, my angel. To where shall we adventure?”

She hesitates, studying as her breath warbles high with excitement.

“There-” she points.

“I want to go there.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is a feat, convincing her to bathe and dress before they land.

She bleats about being able to bathe herself, then promptly scalds herself when she steps under the spray with the dial for hot water turned all the way up. She curls whimpering into his collar, drenching his front as he collects cool water in his cupped hand and soothes it down her back, cooing to her softly until she’s calm enough to wash. He lathers her efficiently, lingering only on his knees between her swollen folds to see how raw she is from their lovemaking. Her flesh is red and hypersensitive, she tries to shrink back from his gentle touch.

“A generous coat of bacta will do just the thing,” he assures her as he stands and gathers her hair to wash.

The blooms from his earlier affections make a beautiful wreath around her neck. He admires them as his fingers work tenderly through her tangles, eyes avoiding the ugly barcode-brand just beneath her nape from her first slaver, but pausing at the curious incision scar above the first nob of her spine.

It is small and clinical-looking. She says she cannot remember what it is from.

Soap suds sluice down the pale swells of her breasts and race each other down her belly and soft, small thighs

He changes his shirt after he dries her, then sets her carefully on the lip of the sink to slather her sex in healing cream.

Steam from the shower makes a halo around her head laid back against the mirror. She holds herself apart while avoiding his eyes. Her breath hitches when he presses a generous glob inside.

It takes all his effort not to linger, not to unclick his belt and have her again while her skin is still damp and warm from the shower and the fragrant steam that envelops them. He loves to take her like this, folded into some wanton, helpless position, fully nude while he is still completely dressed. Even sweeter would it be with her arms bound behind her, panties wadded in her mouth-

He settles for a long kiss that makes her sigh shakily when their lips peel apart.

Her anticipation builds while he dresses her inside the cabin, she holds his shoulders where he’s kneeling and watches through the viewport as the landscape of Alyseaa unfurls before their eyes.

“Ahm’tage,” she gasps at the dense top of lush, verdant rainforest giving way to a canopy of rich, gleaming woodland interrupted by intermittent veins of rushing streams and violent, white-foaming rapids. “Do you see this, do you see it?”

“Yes, darling,” he promises as he tugs her opaque polywoven tights up her thighs.

The nearer they draw, the more colors that spectrum into detail. Greens gilded gold by sunlight, cool blue slates and deep, fertile hues of reds and browns. A male stag with a great horned crown wading in the middle of a shallow stream startles at their incoming. He bounds for land, scattering water and small white fowl in his wake. Birds of every size and every color dash and soar and flitter back and forth above the trees, diving and landing and rioting back up.

Her lashes flicker, dark and separated by the wetness in her eyes. She warbles weakly, arms forgotten in the air above her as he rolls her stiff quilted surcoat over her head and down her chest.

“I didden know there was this much green in all the Galaxy,” she breathes.

He stands and takes her face between his hands. “My darling. This is only the beginning.”

Their ship breaks from the tree line and begins its descent. He makes her sit in the captain’s seat and wear its harness for landing.

She is up, struggling at buckles and slipping under zipping straps as soon as the craft touches down.

“Andromeda,” he cannot help the smile in his voice as he lays his hand upon the touch panel. His heart feels as light as air at her delight, “open the main hatch and lock down all flight controls.”

_“Lock-down sequence initiated. Opening bay one-”_

The ships main hatch opens with a hydraulic hiss. Fresh, crisp air wafts like a cool breath through its widening seams and streams yellow-bright light.

_“Welcome to Alyseaa.”_

Rey is already off, bounding down the ramp before it’s had a chance to touch down to the grass.

He leisures, taking his time unlocking the cabinet above the control board and shrugging into his shoulder holster before he rifles for his rolling papers and tobacco tin tucked in next to his rapier. He leaves the sword inside for now, not inclined to keep her from snatching for two weapons when his blaster will suffice.

His fingers lace, he breathes deeply and stretches overhead, savoring the broad pull in his shoulders and tilting his chin until he cracks his neck. The air tastes sweet and alive, like soil and stream and blooming things. After years trapped in winter’s grip, the stretch in his eyes from the strong natural sunlight is a welcome strain.

He steps lively down the ramp.

A handful of meters from the ship, his babe is down on her hands and knees in the short, dew-drenched grass.

His heart kicks, a thousand black possibilities pour through him as he sprints to meet her.

“Rey, Rey Rey Rey-” he slides to a kneeling stop by her side and takes her slender shoulders in his shaking grasp, “Rey, my darling look at me, can you breathe, can you speak, Rey-”

She lifts her head. Her eyes are red and streaming tears, she is twisting at fistfuls of grass.

The verdant blades shower his back and slip away in the breeze as she throws her arms around his neck and sobs.

“There-there,” he rocks her, smoothing her braid and kissing her hair, “I know, sweet one, I know.”

“I- cah-ha-han’t-” she keens into his chest. His throat feels unbearably tight.

“I know, I know. It’s overwhelming. Take all the time you need.”

Birdsong and the whisper of the wind through the treetops bathes the clearing in gentle sound. He sees the boughs moving, rippling against the cerulean sky.

“Ahm’tage,” she bleats, as her hands wind in his shirt. She is still crying as she tries on shaking legs to stand, “H-help me see, I want- I want to see- help me-”

Tenderly, he draws her to her feet.

“There now,” he tucks her in against his sidebody and shores her up with his arm. Her hands still cling as he dips near and points out sights.

“See the small flowers growing along the ground? That’s clover. And the little striped beasts buzzing about them, those are bees. Fascinating creatures, aren’t they? Be careful, though. They do bite. And look, darling, look at the blossoms on the trees-”

Like a child who has been blind all her life and now can see, she drinks in every shape, every color. Every sight she sees is miraculous, wonderful and new.

Watching her, he aches in ways he never knew he could.

Slowly, when she is ready, he leads her carefully over grass and clover and white nettle, blue thistle and creeping rose thyme, to one of the trees in the meadow that’s flowered. She stares up into its lush boughs of waxy leaves washed golden by the sunlight seeping through its branches and awes at its blooms.

Each pale blossom blushes towards its center, from which its tiny yellow stamen strain out towards the sun. He lowers a branch to her so that she can smell its fragrance, feel the silkiness of its petals against her face. They cling onto the tears in her lashes and on her cheeks like snowflakes, she warbles up her hand to pet them with the tips of her trembling fingers.

A breeze blows, catching and lifting the palest outer petals off their buds and scattering them across the meadow in an undulating sigh, like a startled flock of white-feathered doves.

She watches and laughs like a child.

Her beauty in this moment is indescribable. Her flushed cheeks, her smiling mouth, her great, golden eyes. She seems to him to be made of light.

He has always, always loved her. All his life.

“I want to see more, Ahm’tage,” she tugs his collar, hops quaking and effervescent inside his arms, “please show me more, show me show me show me-”

He takes her by the hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I mean, I'm in love with Hux. *shrugs helplessly*


	5. The wholesome snack / That smiles back / Until you bite their heads off!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sith-mares. Some dubcon. Okay, mostly dubcon.

He doesn’t know about the tracker.

Where she’s waiting for him at the mouth of the forest, Rey tips her head back and peers out through the long, twisting branches at her slice of sky.

It’s blindably blue, much deeper and more saturated than she ever saw on Jakku. It sparkles like a jewel, opaque enough that she’s sure she can touch it if she just reaches up on her tiptoes. Armitage says it’s because this world has _oh-shins_. Their color talks to the sky.

Anxiety twists her tummy, making her feel flutterish and small.

Using her fingers, she counts out loud under her breath the number of days she’s been on Alyseaa.

_Twenny-two… twenny-three… tweeny-four._

Plus the days they were on the ship, that’s almost a whole cycle.

Kylo Ren will be here any second.

She has to get off this world. _Now._

 _Tell him_ , a voice that sounds awfully like her own whispers. It’s coming from the soft, still place at the back of her skull. The same place that sparkles when Armitage makes her come, or when he holds her face in his two hands and pets her lip with his thumb and calls her, _my love._

_Stupid liar._

A breeze badgers the silence of her meadow, rolling like a huff down the big mountain and wending its way through the leaves of the trees, making them chatter and wave. All around her ring of sky, their canopies tickle, flashing gold-over-green in the sun that sings high. The birds chitter-chitter, croo and caw.

Her nervousness ratchets tighter. She knots her fingers together so hard they turn pink then white.

Her man’s been gone a long time. Into the woods to fetch water, from the thick, clearful stream that cuts through the trees like a rushing vein.

She won’t go in there with him, even though he takes his blaster and rapier. There’s something lurking in that forest, deep inside where the trees overlap so much their canopies touch and block out the sun. Some sort of beast, slick and predatory. With the same cold feeling roiling unseeably off its body as Kylo Ren’s.

_Darkness._

She _hates_ the dark.

Where she’s standing, the trees are farther apart. She can touch two at the same time only if she spans her hands out on either side of her. Sunlight sieves through their leaves and dapples the moist, rich soil and composting leaves in cupfuls of pale, watery gold.

Her heart works harder as she tries to squint through the shade beyond her, between the gaps in the thickening trees. He disappeared in there twenty minutes ago.

_Maybe Kylo Ren killed him. Maybe he’s already here-_

Her breath shakes. With her back to the meadow, she creeps up to a tree with bold leaves and lays her belly along its trunk. Her hands tremble where they press into the rough, knotted bark - slowly, very slowly, she peeks her face around the leading edge.

Up above her, in the canopy, the wind whispers its taunts.

 _Come back,_ she wills him. _Ahm’tage, come back._

Like the violent crack of a master’s whip, a blastshot rips through the silence.

She jerks back, stumbling shuffling through the leaves, and shrieks out. Birds riot up through the forest, in the distance, hooves pound away. Or maybe that’s the racing beat of her heart.

Ren is here to take her back to Starkiller. She’s weaponless, naked without Armitage to defend her. Her master's has shot him dead.

She screams and screams more.

“Rey-”

Armitage breaks swiftly through the trees into the clearing. The waterbag slung over his shoulder swings sloshing in time with his long, elegant stride. Its strap is clenched in one big hand, blast-pistol in the other. The spotted sunlight sweeps over him as he weaves fast, catching his hair that sweeps down over one cool blue eye.

Still side-parted but slightly wild without any product to hold it, his mane flashes like fire. His beard too that’s grown in since they landed. Kept short and neatly trimmed, it blazes beneath the white-sharp ridge of his cheekbones. His dark boots crush the fragile new growth straining up through the compost, his utility belt slung round his hips glints each time he steps through a smattering of sun. His black dress shirt is tucked into his trousers, accenting the sharp vee made by the line of his waist to his shoulders. The hilt of his rapier _chinks_ lightly against his side.

He is the most sophistical pirate she’s ever clapped eyes on.

She lands hard on her bum in the leaves and sobs.

“What is it?” he glances like an eagle all around them as his fast footsteps stir the leaves beneath their feet.

He holsters his blaster in its shoulder strap. The indicator light on its grip turns from green to red as he kneels down. “Tell me angel, what’s wrong?”

“Scared the piss outta me, s’what, _stupid_!” she barks up at him. Her Jakkuvian accent is so thick she can hardly make herself out.

She forgets she’s supposed to be acting all tender and tamable as, mouth trembling, she snatches up a handful of slick, fragrant leaves and flings them at his face. “What the fuck you shootin’ for!”

He ducks down, trying to catch her eyes with his cold, clearful ones. His expression, like his voice, is unbearably soft, "There now, did the blastshot frighten you, my sweetheart?” 

“No,” she snaps, hardly managing not to rock up and slap him. Instead she mocks his soothing lilt, “I saw a flutterfly and started screamin’ for no reason. _Course_ I was fright-like, you lunatic.”

It makes her chest ache in a way she hates when he takes one of her balled, shaking hands and unfurls it, clicking his tongue. 

“Forgive me," he raises her to his lips. They brush her knuckles, feather-soft, "I promise you, it was not my intent.”

Her belly flip-flaps. She slides her glare sideways at the ground. “Well it did. I thought Kylo Ren killed you…”

“Ren?” he snorts, smirking, “I’d enjoy watching him try.”

His cockiness makes her chest twist and burn for terror. When Kylo Ren does show up, he’s going to tear this silly cocksucker limb from limb. Then she’ll be really shit-fucked.

 _Tell him,_ the voice in the back of her brain warns whispering, _tell him Kylo Ren is coming. He’ll knows what to do-_

No.

If she tells him that Kylo Ren can track her, he’ll leave her here on Alyseaa for good. Don’t matter what he says when he’s trying to make her to lie still and be good for him. The things he murmurs into her hair. He doesn’t love her, and he definitely won’t risk his life to keep her. Not when the Galaxy’s full of pretty girls who’d happily warm his cock for less trouble than she’s already given him.

Soon as he finds out about the tracker, he’ll loose her. Then it won’t be no time before Kylo Ren finds her. She has to take the ship before he does.

She has to find a way.

“Rey-” the leaves at her feet rustle softly. Where she’s drawn her feet up to her bum so she can hug herself, his long arms reach around her.

He lifts her up off the moist ground and sets her on his knee. Her bum is slightly damp from the wet leaves. His thigh is solid and warm.

Her belly squeezes and her heart flitter-patters as his big hand strokes down her back, calming the anxiety flapping around inside her like a bird caught in a net. The slot between her thighs slickens shamefully, she wraps her arms about his neck and hides her flush in his shoulder. Through the cool scent of soil and leaves, she smells him. Fresh clothes and sweet-scented rolling papers. Under his smooth dress shirt, his skin is sweat-damp and hot. It’s humiliating, how much it comforts her. She mews miserably into his collar.

Can’t he just drop dead?

“Oh my sweetheart,” he bounces his knee and leans back to look at her as his long finger strokes her hair from her cheek. “Don’t be frightened. The Sith cannot find us here.”

 _You’re wrong_ , she wants to shout. She wants to push his chest and slap his face and kick away from him. She wants him to take her away and hide her in the stars.

_Save me kill you love me hate you let me never let go-_

“Would you like to go back to camp?” his chest vibrates with his murmur into her hair, “Have a bite to eat, perhaps?”

She nods, feeling sick and useless and weak.

_How long till I’m dragged back to Starkiller?_

She tries not to guess as he sets her onto her feet.

Avoiding his eyes, she tries hefting their waterbag up onto her back by its strap, but its weight is ludicrous. Even after she manages to lift it warbling a few inches off the ground, it changes her center of gravity, making her teeter and stumble. Her arm aches badly.

“Allow me,” he says.

The strap slides _zerp_ ing off her shoulder, water sloshing inside the bag as it thwaps back into the leaves.

She stares at it, eyes stinging, and folds her arms. His big pale hand reaches down.

Like it’s filled with feathers, he lifts it in one smooth go.

She chuffs, flushing for no reason. “Well aren’t you magnifable?”

“Hardly,” she can _hear_ his smirk as he kneels down. This time, he’s facing the same way she is, out at the meadow.

With the heavy waterbag slung over his shoulder, he gestures, “Hop up. You can ride me home.”

“What, both of us?” she snorts, then flinches a little. She’s supposed to be playing nice-wife, so he don’t get suspicious. Masters are always suspicious of sassful slaves.

Sides, he don’t need to know she likes pretending he’s her Gungan-pony. Or that she loves feeling closer up to her slice of sky.

Over his shoulder, he gives her his sharp white profile. The dark wells that were under his eyes when they first landed have all gone. His stubble that’s grown in thick crinkles as he grins. “Us? Do you have a mouse in your pocket, Misses Hux?”

She huffs, _Insufferable moron._ “The waterbag, obv’usly.”

His smile widens, showing all his big, straight teeth. Her belly tickles like a traitor.

“Nonsense,” he chides, “Hop up.”

Only because she wants to be comply-ly, she shuffles up through the leaves and wraps her arms about his neck. Her stance widens, she drapes her front down along his back, feeling the powerful plates of his shoulder blades where they press against her breasts.

He catches the backs of her knees in a sure, gentle grip and hikes her little boots off the ground. With a quiet grunt, he stands.

It’s one long, smooth motion that ends in him on light, solid feet with the waterbag dangling down from one shoulder and her securely hitched on his back. Her knees slot into the crook of his elbows, he tickles her calves so that her feet kick and she lets out an involuntary snigger before they set off across the meadow for camp.

As they breach the tree line and break out into the full glory of the sunlight, her heart reaches through the slats of her ribs for the sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He takes her in their shelter after lunch.

Those first few days on the ship, she thought his appetite for fucking her was endless. Since they've landed, she knows he was _holding_ _back._

She lies beneath him on the soft bedding he tucks in so neatly every morning, knees hugged up to his ribs, heels notched into the dips in the small of his back. Her arms are bound loosely beneath her, trapped in the folds of her surcoat he pulled over her head and shoulders. His mouth works her bare breasts, soft lips and slick tongue slip-sliding sensation all over her. Her feet bounce in time with his quick, slapping thrusts.

She pants fast, tongue lolling, eyes squinched shut, moaning and whimpering like a good little cockslave. She can’t help it, he makes her feel so-

“Ahm’tage,” she groans, deep and guttural, head tipping back so far her crown kisses the sheet. The bedding is hot where he laid her, cool where she is not. Light hums through her, building in her belly then scattering buzzing as she comes. “Ahm’tage, _stop-_ ”

The sensation is overwhelming, making her shudder and clench and arch, pressing her hips back into the bedding as her sore little cunny tries to pin him in place at her womb. Liquid fizzling pleasure tingles in her toes and in her breasts and in the tips of her fingers, in her tummy and the still, small part of her skull that loves the sound of his name leaving her mouth.

He doesn’t stop, drawing softly the sparkling sensation up through her nipple as he worries her in his mouth. His thick cock makes a loud, squelching sound each time he returns to her, hips pistoning shallow but fast.

After weeks of generous swabs of bacta and near-constant fucking, his size no longer feels like it’s splitting her apart. She’s molded to him, her used little pussy knitted into a tight sleeve for his girth, like a glove two sizes too small. Now, when his hips blur over hers, the hard, veined length of his shaft rubs continuous, aching pleasure over every inch of her soft, swollen walls.

The ache is so good it makes her judder, she’s so wet it soaks her thighs and makes their bellies slip and their bodies glisten when he peels them apart. Her slick glitters in the bright nest around his cock that trails back to his navel, and on her smooth, reddened mound.

Her tendons stand up against her neck as the sweetness becomes unbearable, her thighs quaking from straining too taut. She gushes and keens, a wounded, warbling sound, as her fingers flex at the small of her back. “ _Ahm’ta-ahge!”_

He lets her loose from his lips with a loud, wet _pop._

She can’t see his face, her eyes are closed, drenched the same color as his sunfire hair by the light soaking into their shelter. But she feels his breath fanning hot over her breasts and her neck as he pants, “Come on my cock.”

His coax is ragged and velvet-soft.

She’s burning up as her cunt wrings him so hard he has to grip her hips in his huge, hard hands and move her with him to keep pace. She rocks helplessly among the damp sheets.

“That’s it, cherished. Come, come on Papa's cock-”

Her whole body snap-shudders, ribs reaching for heaven as her mouth strains open in a silent, breathless scream.

Killing her. He’s killing her with pleasure.

She convulses as hot, rushing, sparkling sensation snips the strings that tie her soul to her body. Her heart takes flight, rising up through her to float against the ceiling of their shelter. She looks down at them and sees the strong, pale flex of his muscles, sees her lashes flicker as her eyes roll behind their closed lids, taking in the stars.

In _this_ moment, she loves him. He is all there ever was.

“Ahm’tage…” her sigh trails. Her tongue feels thick, dry from her panting. She’d close her mouth if she could. But she’s too tired.

Slowly, her heartbeat sinks back to their planet as he cages her in his arms.

“Look at me, angel,” his breath is stuttering, inside her now as he hovers over her, so close their noses brush. Adrenaline crackles like static in her ears, softening the sound of his growl.

Still, she peels open her eyes.

Above him, the rounded shadows of leaves ripple in clusters with the breeze over the cool white ceiling of their shelter. His hair is so bright, translucent gold at its outline, that it stretches her blown-out eyes. His are clear and burning, backlit like looking at the sun through sapphire. Each individual hair on his cheeks and chin stands out.

He’s still fucking, she realizes from where she’s soaring through the galaxy. Deep, reaching strokes that knock on the soft door inside her. He can’t get enough of her.

For some reason, right now, that makes her unbearably smug.

His lush, pink lips are wet and parted. His panting bathes her face in hot breath. She wants to take him between her hands and let him drink from her mouth.

“Kiss,” she whispers dreamily, lids hooded, still quaking. Her feet have fallen from his back, knees splayed wide open. Her legs are too heavy to move.

“I love you,” he rasps as he traps her in a bruising hold. His forearm beneath her bum tilts her hips, pinning her to take him too deep, as the other winds under her shoulder so he can wrap up his hand in her hair.

He smothers her snort with his tongue down her throat.

She comes again as he slams hard and holds still, swelling inside her until she’s bursting. His cock paints her belly in warm jets of his come.

The sensation is so satisfying, her eyes close and her head lulls limp on her neck.

Her body works hard to drink every drop, swallowing in gulping contractions that milk more from his big, fat cock. His come is slick and soothing, it rushes to fill in all the gaps left by a life without any love.

They kiss lazily as he shudders and fills her more.

She wishes she could shatter him and keeps only the pieces she longs for. The sweetness and the tenderness and the times he makes her feel like her heart is right and whole. But as the days sieve into each other, like grains of sand passed from hand to hand, she loses track of the parts she despises. Maybe he’s made magic on her, like Kylo Ren tried to. But instead of worming with a needle-tip into her mind, he does it with long kisses and perfect touch.

When his lips drag down to the spot on her neck and suckle, she feels completely drunk.

“Don’t go ‘way,” she whimpers, unable to hold him with her arms pinned behind her back. Only they aren’t, because he’s worked her loose of her surcoat. He laces their fingers together and holds her hands by her head, forearms pressing, big thumbs stroking her wrists. She feels too good to know shame.

“I will never leave you,” he speaks breathless and soft-snarling into her ear, so that his words slide ‘lectric down her spine. “You are my love, you are my girl-”

It’s too much. Like stepping suddenly into sinking sand, sleep pulls her down into its maw. Dimly, she feels his come rush and dribble hot and slick down her thighs as he arranges her onto her side. She slots into the hollows between his ribs and tucks her head under his chin before the world goes beautifully dark.

 

 

 

 

 

She dreams about Kylo Ren.

The beast is dragging her down a blue-lit corridor. The sterile light reflects on every surface of the dark paneling and tiled floors, it seems to narrow like water streaming towards the mouth of a fall to a door at the dead-end of the hallway. Her tender upper arm is in his crushing grip, her bootheels squeak and slip on the glossy tile as she tries to peddle back.

_“No, no no please no I’ll be good, I’ll be better Master Ren I promise, please no-”_

His long lumber is steady. Pitiless. He smiles kindly down into her terror-filled face.

 _“Don’t be afraid,”_ he soothes her. The door at the end of the hall opens like a mouth all on its own.

She screams.

 _“Control your fear,”_ he speaks calmly over her screaming. His footsteps never falter. They are almost at the threshold, _“Kill it, if you have to-”_

 _“No!”_ he’s dragging her on her knees as her boots kick and squeal. Her heart beats so fast in her throat she’s afraid she will choke, _“No please- help me! Somebody help me! Make him stop-”_

He hauls her thrashing body up from the floor and holds both her arms to keep her on her feet. His big, bone-white face bends down until they are level, his lightless eyes follow the streak of her tears down her cheeks. _“It’s the only way to become who you were meant to be.”_

 _“Please,”_ she bleats, breath strangling. She shakes and shakes and shakes more, _“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’ll be better, please-”_

His huge hands pry tenderly where she’s trying to cling to his surcoat. He holds them two together in his paw and smears back her tears with him palm. _“Shhh, I know you’re afraid. But this is the way to the Force.”_

 _“I don’t want it,”_ she sobs, already know what’s about to happen. What he’ll do to her next. Behind her, the cold is already reaching coiling around her from the blackness beyond the door. She shakes her head, _“I don’t want the Force.”_

He smiles. _“We’ll see.”_

And shoves her gently inside.

Shrieking in renewed terror, she stumbles and falls. He seals her inside before she can scramble up to her feet.

 _“Lemm out!”_ she screams so hard her lungs burn. Spit runs down her chin as she kicks and beats the door with her fists and her palms. She can see nothing, nothing inside the swallow of perfect darkness, _“Master Ren, lemme out! Lemme out!”_

Her heart leaps and cracks against her ribs when she hears it coming up behind her, moving heavy on its feet through the pitch-dark. Its breath, like its voice, is unmistakable. Evil. Her whole body begins to judder, like her bones are going shake apart.

_"Whooo-khaa… whooo-khaa… whooo-khaa…"_

She falls to her knees and curls into a ball. Her hands cover her ears, trying to block out its breathing. Even in the total blackness, she squeezes her eyes shut.

_Go ‘way go ‘way go ‘way-_

The _click-burr_ of its red sword makes her jolt and clench her teeth.

_Don’t look at him, he’ll go ‘way, he’ll go ‘way, he’ll go ‘way-_

_“Rey,”_ the creature her Master calls _Grand Father_ speaks her name as it raises its saber.

 

 

She screams and screams and screams.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Rey- Rey, my angel wake up. Rey, you’re dreaming, _wake up-”_

She breaks gasping through the surface of her nightmare. Her arms thrash, blunt fingernails still raking at the closed door. They find purchase in something yielding and bite down. Her man grunts and catches her firmly by the wrist.

“Rey, my darling, you were dreaming. Open your eyes.”

She does, panting rabidly and looking all around like a cornered animal. She feels like she’s burning up.

But the shelter is cool, heavily shaded by the shift in the sun while she slept. Only gentle drips of watercolor light dapple its walls and ceiling, the rest is grey shadow and soft white. Her man is naked, his pale, lean body striped in long, red welts from her blind swipes. His hair falls in a damp, wild mass over one of his eyes. He looks more worried than she’s ever seen him, totally uncaring for the slash on his cheek seeping red.

He holds her wrist lightly, thumb over her pulse, and cups the back of her neck in his strong, solid hand. Its weight grounds her terror. She begins to anchor back.

“It’s alright, my love,” he looks straight into her with his one blue eye not hidden by his hair. His voice is steady, measurely. Sure. “It was only a dream. You, are _alright_.”

She nods, stuttering through the tight grip terror has on her lung to breathe in. Her sex is stinging, she notices her thighs are drenched in some thin, sticky, foul-smelling wet.

Humiliation roars up and breaks over her, smashing her relief.

She’s pissed herself. On him, and on the sheets.

She covers her face and sobs.

“There-there, angel,” he gathers her up, spoiled bedsheets and all, and settles her into his lap. She’s disgusting, filthy, slimy in come and urine and sweat. She hates herself, she hates him and Kylo Ren and everybody.

She curls her hand around his neck and hides her face in his chest.

“Shh-shh-shh, shh-shh-shh,” he times his hushes with the slow-motion of his body.

Back-and-forth, back-and-forth, they saw.

He rocks her until her crying winds down to soft hiccups and hitched, breathy sighs. Outside the shelter, the generator kicks over, humming low and benign as it cycles to store power. From the tree line around the meadow, the birds tweet out their sharp, sweet-sounding songs. Wind speaks its babbling tongue through the leaves who rustle back.

She takes a long, shuddering breath and then another. Her arms are folded against her breasts, one hand still holding his neck.

His fingers trail soothing along her back. Up and down… up and down…

He tucks his chin to look into her big, wet eyes.

“Shall we have a bath?”

Shyly, she nods.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inside the shower, she holds his shoulders and lays her forehead on his heart and lets him wash her. His big, hard hands trail swathes of soap suds all across her skin. She watches them race each other down her thighs and whirl dangerously fast around the grate before they slip through its holes into the dark drain.

She has got to get off of this world.

_Tonight._

“Feeling better?” his voice jars her from the cold, black fear still leaching out of her heart.

The water’s turned off. He’s standing naked and dripping in the warm, good-smelling steam, holding onto a bath sheet. His hair is slicked back, water beaded in his short beard glistening under the low utility light.

He is watching her very carefully.

Her eyes prickle. She hides them away, afraid he’ll see what’s behind them.

Betrayal.

And underneath that, something she’s too ashamed to name.

“Yeah,” she says.

She holds still as he dries her off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lemme know whatcha think! : D


	6. Baby Shark / Do-do-dodoo-dodoo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Mrs. Doubtfire voice* Well helloooo there!

On calm, clearful days when she isn’t too nervous to sit stillfully, Rey likes to perch on top of her man’s work bench while he tinkers and watch the blue sparks from his soldering tools dance in his round-lens glasses, and the clouds as they move across her slice of sky.

They drift silently, white-edged with silver underbellies, in soft, whispery shapes her mind makes into pictures. Her meadow is quiet, lulled to peace by the humming cycles of their improvised generator and pierced only by sweet bird-cry. With just the bare supplies and spare components from their lite craft, her man has transformed the space around their ship.

A large, solid shelter strong enough to withstand the winds that rush down the big mountain at night makes the center of the clearing. A simple covered cook station with a small refrigeration unit sits to its right. Alongside that is a filtration system big enough to supply them with clean water for drinking, bathing and to cycle clean their clothes. On the south side of the ship where the meadow gets the most sunlight, a solar-powered terminal commands two handmade satellites to spin their dark faces in smooth loops up at the sky.

He is a cleverable genius, her man. Totally resourceful.

On Jakku, he’d be the Sith.

 _Not my man,_ she scolds herself for the jillionth time as shyly she eyes their generous dinner curing suspended over their cooking station. Large game he shot with his blaster this morning ‘fore the sun came up, then gutted and skinned with his knife.

Her tummy pulses, pleased about yet _another_ night’s sleep with a warm, stuffed belly. His big, calloused hand holding her taut skin as he murmurs praises in her ear and hums her lowly to sleep.

Her man is the best kind of nightmare.

Softly, she swings her bare feet and scans their settlement for something to kill him with.

There aren’t too many possibilities, unless she’s going to bludgeon him with cookery or a support rod. Which would be impossible given his strength and size. His blast-pistol is coded to his handprint, engaging its power core only when _he_ holds its grip. Another one of his cleverable modifications. She’s considered his laser-edged rapier, but it’s not likely to work. She’s never held a sword before, just a quarterstaff made from hollow piping and a cracked ramp support welded poorly together. She isn’t confident she can run him through before he disarms her.

No, she needs something small.

Light changes over the meadow as above her, loose-weave clouds shift across the gaze of the sun. Its rays scatter, sieving in sweeping, slow-moving shafts of gold across the flowers and grasses. Where he sits on an empty fuel cell pulled up to his worktable, the light changes Armitage’s hair from vibrant to violently bright with each pass. A breeze tickles the leaves of the trees all around them, making them sigh a lullaby, it flickers the ends of his fringe over his black round-lens sunglasses.

After her shower, he buttoned her down in his own dark dress shirt while her tights and surcoat cycled dry. He’s wearing just his dark undershirt and sleek trousers, his shoulder holster and sunshades. At the other end of the table, his utility belt and sheathed rapier heliograph beneath the sweeping light. A cigarette smolders in the metal plate beside him, his hair is absolutely wild, dried by the wind and the sun.

He is frighteningly beautiful.

Her hands holding the table edge on either side of her thighs squeeze so hard her knuckles turn white.

She knows what she has to do to him.

But she doesn’t know if she has the strength to do it.

“Are you cold, my love?” his low, sternly voice slips through the silence to startle her. He is watching her above him over the rim of his shades.

The shallow slice from her nail beneath his eye has already scabbed over. She looks down at her bare, tanned legs, mottled with scars and freckles as his hand settles big and warm on her thigh.

The sight makes her heart skip in the wrong ways.

“No. Thank you,” she adds after it stumbles like a trapbeat. She better play missus nice-wife if she don’t want to get caught.

“How about hungry, then? Would you like to eat something? I can make you a little sweet-porridge, something to tide you over until supper,” his thumb sweeps back and forth over her little navel, sensual and tickling, “You’re still so thin.”

“Thass- thass very sweetly of you, Ah- Ahm’tage,” she whispers, turning even shier as her belly flutters. He’s so, so attentive. It makes her feel all wrong. “I ain’t hungry. Promise.”

“Very well,” his big thumb still strokes her tummy, back and forth, back and forth, “As you say.”

Haltingly, because she’s never started one of their kisses before, she leans down to peck his lips while his face’s still turned up.

His mouth is plush and warm, barely wet at the seam. She lingers, heart thrumming when his hand on her thigh glides up slowly to cup her waist.

Sunlight moves over them in a warm, glistening band. Over the peaceful _burr_ of the generator and the chirping of birds, she can hear their wet kissing. His tongue slides easily inside her, tracing along hers in ways that make her moan softly into his mouth.

Like fistfuls of sand slipping through the spaces between her fingers, time falls away from them.

She’s holding his shoulders when finally their lips peel apart. His arms are wound solidly around her small waist.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, watching her with a tender half-smile and those cold, blueful eyes.

She flushes. “For what?”

His answer is another, deeper kiss.

This time when it’s over, her fingers are wound in his hair like an anchor. Her heart is beating everywhere, a frightful, beautiful _badda-ba-bat, badda-ba-bat…_

“My sweet girl,” he nuzzles their nose, she feels his warm, mint-smelling breath on her cool, moist lips as he asks, “How’s your little cunny this afternoon, hm?”

The question’s so private, so ‘barrassing, but there’s something in his blue eyes that makes her answer plainly, though blushing all the way, “Okay, I guess. Bit soreful.”

“I see,” his gaze flickers to the soft pool of black fabric right at the apex of her tender inner thighs.

Her little sex clenches in response.

“Would you like me to apply a bit more bacta?” he lets his index finger trail slowly down her shirt front while both of them watch.

Gingerly, he slips beneath the hem of her shirt and strokes her slit.

Beneath her fresh wrappings, her cunny gulps and gushes, making her mew pathetically as she widens a little her creamy white thighs. Her fingers are clenched at his shoulders in his undershirt.

“Or perhaps you’d like Papa to kiss it better?” His eyes are on hers now, watching her face with feral love.

“N-no thank you, Pa... Papa,” she whimpers, trying to keep her voice from shaking as she settles back into her perch with her hands still clutched in his shirt. When he looks at her, talks to her like that, she can’t even remember what she was supposed to be looking out for.

“Wha-whass that?” she nods to thing he’s been working on laid forgotten on the table.

“Ah, clever girl,” he praises with another of his quarter-smirks.

Her hands slip off his shoulders as he move his solder-gun to one side, she can draw a deep breath again, if a bit shaky one, while he lifts his project for her to see.

It’s something like a vest made from coated polyweave fibers, like her surcoat. Durable and strong. A series of smooth wires run its outer surface, webbing out like leaf veins and ending in a dozen small electrical nodes. There’s a small metal power pack with a clip attached to the vest on thin coated cable. It hums as he switches it on.

She tilts her chin like a bird examining a worm when its nodes buzz and light up.

“It’s an electro-pulsar,” he explains as the dull blue light of the nodes begins to whiten and swell, “a sort of high-powered electron diffuser that reverses the current of strongly charged objects. A Force neutralizer, if you will. Or rather, a rough duplicate of one. I had to abandon its archetype when-”

He glances up at her. The meaning is there, on the surface of his glass-like eyes.

“When we lef’,” she finishes for him, quietly. Her belly flitters remembering their first meeting. The whiteness of the woods behind him and his dark uniform dusted with snow.

Over the curve of his sunglasses, his gaze trails her features. Wonderingly, as if he’s membering it too. “Correct.”

She’d seen him on base, of course, the few times her master let her out of his chambers. In meetings and on their walks around the base. His bright hair and white skin made him unmistakable. So did the way he always seemed to be glancing away from her whenever she looked at him. At first, she thought he looked sternly, stuck-upish and cold.

But the way he spoke to her in the woods, how he knelt down to share his gloves and his great coat, made her think he was kind.

Boy _,_ was she ever a shit judge of character.

“Whass it for?” she asks, ignoring the prickle in her eyes. She can’t blink, the white lights on the vest are so mesmerable. Their buzzing has cranked up to a high-pitched whine.

The sound cuts suddenly when he switches the power pack off. The nodes’ light fades from white to blue to nothing.

“For slaying the Sith,” he say calmly.

At the mention of Kylo Ren, she shrinks back.

“Are you lunatical?” her pitch raises and warbles, her heart beats a thousand times faster, tripping over and over as she shakes her head, “There’s no one can kill Kylo Ren-”

Carefully, he sets the vest to one side and takes off his sunglasses. He folds their frames before setting them with a quiet _click_ on the workbench. His chin tips, his mild stare meets her terrified one exactly.

“Absolutely, I can.”

For a while, they watch each other in silence. She searches for the madness, or the joke, or the lie lurking beneath the still surety in his eyes while he stares back at her steadily, as if he’s got nothing to hide.

“S’at why you took me, then?” her lip trembles, but she tries to sound haughty. Contemptful, “So that he can come an’ find me and fall into your trap?”

He smiles with just the corner of his mouth. “Not at all.”

Her brow furrows suspiciously as he sits forward, face still turned up to hers. She finds she doesn’t have the will power to lean back before he takes her again between his two hands.

He holds her as if she’s something precious. Womanly and rare. “I took you, because you are my lady. Rey-”

She blinks, not at him, but at her hands twisted together in her lap. Her lashes, she realizes, are wet.

“I know Ren has convinced you he is… invincible. I know he did terrible things to you whilst you were under his care. Unspeakable things. You fear him, very gravely. Hear me when I tell you I understand.”

She thinks of the black room at the end of the corridor. The coldness of the Dark Side and Ren’s sick, lightless stare. Her hands wring tighter, her knuckles pop and bloom white. “You don’t know what he’s like.”

“But I do,” his voice is soft, gentle. Rumbling like a lion-purr, “that’s why I took you. I couldn’t bear to think of you, a perfect child, left alone with a man like Ren.”

She snorts bitterly. “Yeah, well. He done no worse than you ‘ave.”

Rather than anger, that gets an amused half-grin.

“My poor sweetheart,” his tongue clicks sympathetical, the tips of his long fingers chase back a wisp of her hair, “Have I been very cruel to you?”

Her lip wobbles, she stares at her lap without blinking for fear of tears.

His expression gives way to tenderness. “Married life can be such a harsh transition, I know, even for Arkanian girl-”

“Oy-oy, I ain’t no _Arkanian girl_ ,” she scoffs, head snapping up, mortally offended.

“Of course not,” in this moment, his crisp drawl and the gentle humor glinting in his blue eyes make him even more handsomeable. “You are a Jakkuvian queen if ever I saw one. I merely meant that the... _marital customs_ of my ancestors can seem quite barbarous. Quite unkind. Even to a simple Arkanian girl, for whom abduction by the male heir to a powerful family is the absolute height of romance.”

“Romance?” her piping sounds more petulant than sharp-tongued as she watches him from beneath her lashes, “Your ma didden find it too romance-like, did she?”

He blinks, sitting slightly back. “My mother?”

“You know,” she makes a motion, “since she tried stabbin’ your pa with a kitchen knife and everything.”

“Ah.” His face says he understands now as his eyes fall to his hands holding her waist. She’s so small his fingers almost touch front and back. “I believe you mean my father’s _wife_ , rather than my mother. They were not one in the same.”

Now it’s her turn to puzzle as he presses a soft kiss to her lips and stands.

White-winged flutterflies scatter, tiny birds dive and swoop back to catch them inside their small bills. The trees sing with every soft sigh down the mountain. She can’t not watch the way the muscles in his back and along his shoulders ripple as he walks.

Until a glint catches the very most corner of her eye.

On the workbench is his small hunting knife, still in its scabbard. Its handle heliographs in the sun.

Her breath snares. The knife is less than an arm’s reach from her hand.

“Rey.”

She jumps.

He is standing at the base of their ship’s ramp. Watching her.

He looks so deadly, all strong jaw and dark clothes and bright burning eyes. His shirt is molded to the hard lines of his slender body, the long, corded tendons in his strong forearms strain up at his pale skin. His hair glows so fiercely beneath the sunlight, he is like the spiders with red markings on their black bodies suspended in their trembling, dew-jeweled webs. The kind he warns her never to touch.

He smiles, just with the corners of his eyes. “Be a good girl and gather a bit of kindling for the fire, won’t you?”

She swallow her heartbeat and bobs.

“Thank you, angel. You are a treasure. And-” he adds with a brief glance at the shifting skies. “Do keep by the ship, where I may see you. It’s getting dark…”

She nods again and waits thundering inside for him to climb all the way into the ship, and for the crisp timber of his voice as he addresses Andromeda, before quick as a cobra bite she snatches up the knife and shoves it down the neck of his dress shirt into her chest bindings. She skitters off the bench and into the meadow, hands shaking and straining to see through the white stress lights popping in her eyes as she scrambles to gather tinder their fire.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a dark room aboard _The Finalizer,_ inside a circle of three-dimensional schemas revolving slowly above their terminals, stands Kylo Ren.

Hand laid lightly on his lightsaber, he draws closer to a schematic hovering over a terminal to his left. The projection is as large as he is, without his mask its pale blue glower reflects in his face, changing its hawkish angles with shadows as it turns.

“What is it?” he asks.

“It appears to be a set of blueprints. Some kind of device,” Phasma, his Captain, is studying closely another projection to his right. Her head is cocked inside her helmet, her chrome armor halos in the cool light. “An engine, perhaps?”

“Or a weapon,” he says grimly, peering into the strands of blue binary code helixing together to form pulsating columns of data.

He has no idea what they _mean._

“Is this everything we were able to recover from the mainframe before it corrupted?” his calm timber masks the fury roiling inside his gut.

The Arkanian bastard had coded tripwires into the Imperial systems’ security protocols, when administrators attempted to access his personal hard drive it triggered a program to scramble both the Empire’s primary and auxiliary servers. Millions of datasets were irreparably corrupted. For four days, _The Finalizer_ subsisted on emergency lights and field kits for food and filtered water while the Galaxy’s greatest system engineers had to work around the clock just to restore the simple protocols for the ship’s energy turbines. The communication signals between all Imperial crafts were totally lost, whole active fleets deployed around the Galaxy in the dark. The Archives were destroyed without hope of restoration. Satellites fell out of the skies.

_… dark jungle tiger creeps through moonlight spreading blood he hunts …_

“This, and his manifesto,” the Captain is as wry as ever with her reply. “The ramblings of a raving lunatic. _Your despotic reign of tyranny and corruption is over,”_ she quoted, “ _no longer shall the Galaxy be subject to the cruel, megalomaniacal whims of the Sith-_ Ludicrous. He’s gone mad.”

“No,” Ren turns.

His profile glows in the wash of blue light – black saber, black surcoat, black mane. White face. He looks like a wraith. Like Death.

Yet he feels afraid.

“This isn’t madness,” his eyes trace around the binary shapes hovering over their terminals, “This is intricate, organized. _Orchestrated._ He has been planning this, for _years_. Right in front of our eyes-”

His inflection doesn’t change until the very last second, when his clenched leather fist suddenly connects with the closest terminal and shatters the glass. Its face crumples and crushes inwards, white sparks shower as its projection wavers and then flickers out.

His chest heaves, straining the polyweave of his surcoat. He thinks he can burn down the Galaxy with just his rage.

“Then why risk all of it?” despite his outburst, Phasma’s tone remains clinical. Calm. “Why throw everything to chance by taking such an insignificant hostage? Unless, somehow she is an integral part of his plans.”

“He took her, because he’s a sick Arkanian child-monger,” his words shake, he grits and bares his teeth against the truth that guts him whenever it leeches through the cracks in his mind, “he’s a fucking mongrel dog _-”_

“Sir,” it’s the bridge captain. A terrified-looking officer in a smart Imperial uniform. At the foot of the dais surrounded by terminals, he snaps into attention and salutes violently before he reports, “Scanners have detected her Majesty’s microwave signature on an abandoned world in the Outer Rim.”

_So. We have found her._

The hatred, the sheer, knifing grief wells up like a tsunami inside Ren. With nowhere else to go, it animates through his aura and lashes out at the bridge captain cowering near the foot of the dais.

The Darkshear kills him in one strike.

“Prepare my ship.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Am I even doin’ it right?”

Crouched down by the fire with her stick wobbling over its licking flames, she gives her portion of rich meat another turn and huffs. Her knees are tucked up to her chest, bum suspended over her little bare heels, face cozily warm from the heat. Her supper has shriveled to half its size, black on one side and still nearly pink on the other, weeping grease that hisses and pops when it hits the logs burning in the belly of the fire.

Her gaze flickers doubtfully to her man’s portion, suspended steadily just above the peaks of the shifting flames, plump and glistening and evenly golden.

She sulks.

Hunkered down on the balls of his boot soles next to her, her man takes her spit from her tiny, tired fingers. “Here.”

He uses the naked length of his own stick to coax her supper onto the plain tin plate set between them. Her meat resists and leaves dry, charcoaled bits stuck to the metal. It _thunks_ dully when it hits the plate.

His glides smoothly beside it, smelling savory and perfectly done.

“ _Told you_ I’d be rubbish at it,” she wraps her arms around her shins and pouts into her knees.

“Nonsense,” patient as ever, his big hand strokes her braid down her back.

He sits himself on the blanket spread about behind them far enough from the circle of their crackling fire to be safe from the sparks. It’s nighttime, the sun’s been swallowed by twilight’s gentle, yawning mouth. The pink glower that follows the line of the horizon at sundown has already turned soft purple that bleeds to thick indigo dark. The stars are out, layered deep and multicolored, so bright and clear above her she thinks she can tip back her head and feel their cool light on her face.

Her man is still dressed darkly, freshly shaved from his turn in the fresher. He looks lightyears younger than he did a few weeks ago. His white skin glows in the lapping firelight, his blue stare shines silver, as if there are mirrors behind his eyes. In one hand he holds their supper plate. With the other he _pat-pats_ his strong thigh.

“Come. Sit with me, my love.”

Her heart skip-stutters. She goes uncomplainly, without any struggles or whimpering or making him chase her through the meadow, only to catch her and carry her back slung over his shoulder. Because she needs him relaxed-like tonight. Loose and not suspicious.

His hunting knife is wrapped up in her chest bindings and stuffed beneath her pillow, she hid it away while he showered, hands shaking and looking over her shoulder the whole time.

Tonight, she’s gonna kill him in his sleep.

She takes his hand and lets his guide her down into his lap. Her tan, slender legs press together, her feet tuck into the soft folds of warm blanket between his calves. Her little breasts ache, vulnerable to cool night without her wrappings. Her heart thuds quickly against her ribs.

All round her, the night peers at them with knowing eyes as the cada-bugs thrum their low, creaking songs.

 _“It’s a mating call,”_ her man explained their first night on Alyseaa while she awed suspiciously at the sweet-singing grass. Like a thousand tiny doors chirping open and shut at the same time. _“Each one calls to a lover.”_

Something about that still made her almost unbearably sad.

Maybe it’s because she knows what it’s like to stand on top of the tallest big-dune on Jakku and scream out into the night.

_“Someone find me. Someone love me. Please, anybody, take me home-“_

_Be careful what you wish for,_ she thinks bitterly. Until her man tips up her chin with just the tips of his fingers and presses his lips to hers.

Softly.

“You’ve been a very good girl today, my angel,” he says when their lips part with a gentle sound. His accent is always so crisply, so preciseable, even when he makes his voice do that thing.

Rumble low in her belly and make her poor heart flitter-flap.

His thumb traces the shape of her lip. “I’m very pleased.”

Her lashes flicker, deep down inside her something needful puddles and melts. It slips into her bloodstream, fanning out hot like dragon’s breath through her body. She’s so warm where the heat of the fire washes her through his dress shirt, the rest of her is tucked up sensually against him, his big arm around her waist.

Their mouths are still very close as she whispers, “Have I really been good?”

“Oh yes. You are perfection,” he kisses her again.

His kisses make her think of how the big basilisks on Jakku hunt their prey. With slow, languid movements and smug, lipless smiles. Their forked tongues lashing beautifully up at the sun.

Her man might actually be the meanest in the Galaxy, she thinks as her lips part to let his slick tongue slip to the back of her throat. He strums her small nipples through his shirt, making her mewl and quiver. His smooth touch and that thought together make her little pussy gush.

She likes him. Badly.

He’s made her all wrong.

Her eyes shine like starlight up at his face after he peels their lips apart.

His hand appears near her open, softly panting mouth with an offering - fragrant, succulent meat. She can feel its heat, see its juices glistens on his fingers.

She licks her lips, then frowns.

“But that’s from your piece,” she glances at her poorly supper sitting dull and untouched next to his on their plate by his side. Her hands, she notices accidentally, are still curled up in the black undershirt he’s wearing and tucked against his chest.

She doesn’t even try to feed herself anymore.

“Not at all,” he murmurs, staring always into her with those intenseful eyes. His leg bounces, jiggling her gently until she grins. “What’s mine is yours. Now. Open up, little girl. Papa wants you to eat.”

Well, if she’s killing him anyway-

The meat is delicious, tender and moist. It dissolves richly in her mouth with just a few chews.

She feasts until she is stuffed, letting him alternate meat with fresh fruits and sips of cool water till her lashes droop and her small belly distends a little into his big palm. He coos to her between bites of his own, putting her inna sort of trance with his deep timber and sweet murmurs and soft clicks of his tongue.

“That’s it, one more bite. Ah, _that’s_ the way-”

Gently, he pats her tummy and tickles a bit of grease off the corner of her mouth with his thumb.

“What a nice, full belly we have now. Don’t we, sweet one? You know, on Arkanis, it is the fashion for young ladies to carry a bit of... _softer_ weight. Quite practical, actually. The winters can be very cold. But also-” his fingers strum thoughtfully at her belly through her shirt, “it can be quite sensual. There is a saying about the beautiful girls where I’m from, _Rosy-cheeked and pleasingly plump._ ”

She snorts where she’s snuggled into his shoulder, equal bits bored and amused.

Her man is so lunatical sometimes.

“Yeah well, where _I’m_ from, you’re pre’y enough if yah got both your eyes.”

His laugh rumbles her soothingly before he tells her, “You know you are quite the wit, Misses Hux.”

She hides her smirk in his shirt.

A cool breath blows down the big mountain, moist and rich with the scent of wet earth, promising rain as it rustles the grass. In the distance, thunder grumbles. Like a slaver counting credits at his stall late into the night. An owl _who-who-hoos_ and listens for its lover to call back. The cada-bugs sing to each other like anything. Against the soft, smokier night sky thick with storm clouds around the big mountain, she can make out the flitter and swoop of bats.

_Kylo Ren is coming._

The sudden thought makes her shudder and whimper.

“What’s the matter, my darling?” her man asks.

 _Everything,_ she wants to tell him. _Everything everything everything._

“Nothing. Juss cold,” she says instead.

Her fingers pick shyly at his shirtfront, she bites her lip as the first plops of rain from the clouds curling down like smoke from the mountain hiss into the fire, making it spit back sparks at the stars.

Her heart kicks up. She feels it beat everywhere beneath her skin as she whispers, “Ahm’tage?” 

It sounds like the only word she knows.

“Will you give love to me, please?”

More _snap-crackles_ from the fire as a kind of silence drifts softly between them, like a feather turning as it falls down slowly from the sky. He’s watching her, she feels it even though she doesn’t dare lift her eyes.

Then, as if she doesn’t weigh a thing, he lifts her gently and sets her up on her feet.

She sways with the cold wind sighing down the mountain. Rain drips onto her cheeks like tears falling from her lashes as her face tips up towards the stars. They are dimmer, farther away now.

After tonight, she will always be alone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To everyone who does kudo and comment, I love your beautiful face.


	7. Down Came The Rain And / Washed The Spider Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rough sex, light choking, come eating.
> 
> Oh, and Siths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're happy and you know it READ THE TAGS
> 
> : )
> 
>  
> 
> Songs (I rarely do this, but I feel I owe the vibes of this chapter to) Glass Animals "Hazey" and The Weeknd "Wicked Games". If you haven't heard Glass Animals, they were recommended by Archive's own Lilia_ula and they are *exceptional*. Very sexy-cool.

The scent of cool rain and of slick leaves and wet, yielding earth await them in the thick, solid darkness of their tent. Dots of water touch his face like whispers of a fingertip as he holds the flap apart so that she may enter first. His wife is so petite she does not need to bend down to clear shallow entrance their bedroom.

He knows she has his hunting knife.

He left it for her find on his work bench before he went into the ship for refreshment. The cameras he placed strategically inside their tent and all around their meadow caught her hiding it between her breasts before she ferried it off to their bedding. As he drew his razor over his stubble, checking occasionally his progress in the mirror, he watched her weigh intensely the best place to conceal her new weapon against ease of accessibility. Observed her practice drawing it out from its hiding place among the sheets laid down on her stomach and on her side. Over and over, she sliced its freshly planed edge a hair’s breadth above a pillow positioned to imitate his throat.

Her hand shook, every time.

Now, his eyes strain at the darkness to watch her outline claim the armed side of the thick pelt layered with sheets and thermals that make up their shared bed with a sense of urgent desperation. The bedding is immaculate, perfectly smooth, like a dark placid lake. Had he not seen her through the cameras or noticed his knife was missing, that alone would have tipped him off.

Darling little deviant.

He has so much to teach her.

“Ahm’tage?” her small voice is always softer, more quivering at night. His treacherous little wife is terrified of the darkness.

Another gift from the Sith, he assumes.

“I’m right here, angel,” he murmurs. He can hardly keep the charmed smile out of his voice. “Is there something you’d like to tell me, Rey?”

The silence that floats between them is touched only by the raindrops plinking softly against the roof of their bedroom and by her hitched, staccato breath.

She watches his profile backlit by hazy orange light of the waning embers for a long time before she whispers, “No.” 

He lets the flap slip from his fingers and fall closed behind him, sealing out the light from the fading fire and the stars swiftly swallowed up by the fast-moving storm coming down the mountain. It’s cool inside the tent, his hand slides into his slacks pocket as he speaks lowly into the pitch dark.

“Don’t be afraid.”

A low blue light from an improvised incandescent blooms inside the palm of his hand.

She lets out a long, stuttering sigh.

Smoothly, he guides the incandescent into a faceted globe of diamond-glass he’s repurposed from the ship. Through the globe, its light prisms, creating a pale pattern of light and shadow that tremble softly with the gentle sway of the tent in the wind. As sunlight does when reflected off water onto a wall.

The effect reminds him of the crystal lamps from his mother’s parlor, filled with warm light instead of cold.

He aches for home.

“Thank you,” his wife murmurs. She is laid out like a treat on the blankets, her long dark hair undone from its braid and draped upon her pillow, light shining on the peaks of its deep, glossy waves. Her hands are curled loose and sweet by her cheeks, bare thighs pressed together, one of her little legs crooked slightly at the knee. Her feet are arched as her toes hide themselves within the cool folds of the blankets. His dress shirt is unbuttoned and hardly parted, offering him just a taste of her taut, warm skin in a line down her body beneath. She breathes softly through parted lips, watching him. Waiting.

Through the shadows, her golden eyes shine like stars.

She is the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. Ethereal. Made of light.

On Arkanis, he would have courted her ardently. Lavished her in trinkets and baubles and bathed her in compliments. Taken her riding and to balls. Shown off his home to her with long ambles around his estate and through its gardens, stolen her sweet kisses beneath the blooming boughs of his groves. Proven his wealth by draping her precious little body in rare jewels. Proven his devotion by giving her his name and a title. A belly full of children and a rich, comfortable home.

_Alas._

Rain patters faster against their shelter as he kneels down at the foot of their bed and takes her small ankles in both his hands. Over the gentle rumble of thunder up the mountain, his dress shirt she’s wearing makes a hushed sound against the bedding as slowly he drags her down. Her breath catches, her hair and her arms by her face stretch long as he parts his dress shirt and spreads her thighs.

He takes her small breast into his mouth without preamble as his big hands swallow her waist.

She gasps and strains into his sensual touch.

He lavishes her everywhere with his kiss except for her plush, lying little mouth. Her breasts, her collarbones, the taut, fragile skin of her neck. Her cheeks, her lashes. The beautiful dip of her belly and the soft, succulent swell of her thighs. He does not speak to her as he usually does, he does not croon soft praises and encouragements against her skin and into her ear. The words are there, frothing behind the tightness inside his throat.

“Ahm’tage-” she bleats like a poor lost lamb, tugging his hair in her fingers when still he won’t kiss her mouth. She squirms and flexes beneath him, the muscles of her starved body rippling as she tries to chase his lips.

Wordlessly, without looking into her eyes, his hand comes up to collar her throat inside his shirt.

 _Gently_.

The other grasps and pulls wider her thigh.

Her pink slit parts open for him. Her labia is swollen, red in its inner flesh and glistening wet.

He samples its taste with his tongue.

“Ahm’tage!” she bucks and whimpers, anchorless without his assurances and soft touch.

Smirk curving against her throbbing little sex, he holds her down and suckles firmly at her needy button cit.

Against his tongue, her pulse pounds. She struggles against the sudden overwhelming sensation, clutching at the thick, corded column of his forearm between her breasts with both her small hands. The cuffs of his dark shirt pool around her wrists.

His grip on her throat strengthens just a fraction, he slips and circles his fingers into the grooves beneath either of her ears he knows are so sensitive to touch.

The pressure makes her gasp and shudder. She stops her squirming and whines his name into the tent, “ _Ahm’tage…”_

His hand on her thigh floats away, he folds his long, thick fingers and glides two into her cunt.

She’s molten, hot velvet slathered in sweet, syrupy wet.

_Heaven._

He fucks her firmly while his blue eyes watch over her tensing navel the frantic, erratic rise and fall of her breasts. His fingers inside her turn and spread themselves, he works piteously at that nodule of sensation tucked away in her soft ceiling that makes her screech her pleasure. Her soft walls are swollen, tender from his constant abuse.

A baby bird trapped in the clench of his fist.  

 _Women are like horses,_ his father once said. They stood together inside Hux Stable, his father gently stroking the flank of a black mare. _Sentient, but simpleminded. Exceedingly fragile. The truly dull ones will bolt as soon as you open the gate. But they can be a treasured companion, once they are tame-_

Above him, his wife whimpers, mewling pleading for him to _please slow down_ , it feels too good, he’s touching her _so much_...

From beneath the tangle of his burning mane, he watches her with detached, strangled wonder as he fucks and eats her cunt.

_Above all else, you want to avoid the overly spirited one. Those that are too contrary or stubborn for the task-_

Lightening strikes the meadow and illuminates her young, nude body in a wrenching flash of white. Her eyes are squeezed shut, mouth open, cheeks damply flushed.

 _She is perfection,_ he thinks after her details dissolve into the dark.

He’s been pleasuring her mere minutes when he feels her belly begin to flutter. He can sense the deep shake in her thighs clutched tightly around his jaw. His fingers fuck faster, he picks a brutal pace as her cunt squeezes piteously around him. She is so tight from his love and from her body trying to latch onto him despite her protestations. Her slick trickles freely down his wrist and smears his forearm. Yet, he has to force himself to fit each time he returns.

He is drowning in her salty-sweet musk.

“Look at you, angel,” he lets her poor throbbing clit loose and fans his hot breath in long, sensual spools her trembling navel. Her eyes roll behind their lids just at the sound of his voice. “That’s it. Such a sweet little slut…”

She comes _keening_ into the palm of his hand.

How sweet the shrill sound.

He drops a wet, suckling kiss to her pink, pulsing flesh before he rises over her, his big body nearly twice her size. His mouth glistening in her warm pungent slick caresses her neck above his hand, nuzzling his shirt collar aside to paint her skin in her juices. His thick fingers fuck her mercilessly through her orgasm, he keeps her thighs split open across the narrow breadth of his hips, making her take his love as his hot snarl slips down her spine.

“Hush-a-bye, girl. Lie still and let Papa take what he wants.” 

“ _Papa_ ,” she mewls delirious, riding a wave of ecstasy as her little hips fuck back at him and her small hands wind greedily into his hair. He feels the soft sleeves of his dress shirt and smells his own cologne as her arms hold him tight.

Rather than slake, the ravening hunger inside his gut yawns wider, exposing long, venom-tipped fangs.

“Do you think another lover can make you feel this way, Rey?” On his next stroke, he adds a third finger, relishing her breath’s sharp catch and the hot, wet _squelch_. “Do you think another man could own this little cunt-”

She squeals, struggling weakly through a second, more intense climax like a kitten caught by the scruff.

Without missing a thrust, he dips his head and takes one of her pink pearl nipples into her mouth.

Thunder roars overhead as the wind thrashes their tent.

“Please!” she shrieks, drowning in sensation.

She has no idea what is to come.

Her hips rise and fall with the intensity of his thrusts as her cunt convulses with her prolonged orgasm, thick strands of slick shining like wet diamond thread connect her sex in a web to his palm. Her cunny squelches lushly, gushing each time he returns. He counts his strokes as her gasps choke and sputter. Her body locks, she screams silently at the ceiling as her soul shudder-snaps.

 _There now, you’re not simpleminded, are you, Lady?_ his young, pale hand stroked softly down the mare’s dark velvet muzzle after his father had gone, marveling at her strength, her intelligence. Her trust. He looked deep into her beautiful eyes. 

The mare, his father’s wildest, nuzzled and nickered quietly into his neck. _No, you're a sweet, clever girl. What say we get out of this manger and have a nice little ride, hm? Would you like that, my girl?_

He fucks Rey furiously until she orgasms again.

Her slick _gushes_ , he shoves his fingers deep inside her, making her take him all the way to the knuckle so he can press at the mouth of her womb and feel the muscles there flex. Her tiny body gulps back at him, as she crests over a tidal wave of pleasure, he throttles her lightly and growls through his teeth into her ear, “What a greedy little girl you are, Rey. I’d say you’re ready for Papa’s cock.”

“Papa,” Rey croaks sobbing, grabbing and holding his forearm so hard the exact shape of her knuckles are visible through her skin. He can hardly hear her or the rain rushing in torrents against the tent over the thundering of his own heart. “Papa, _please_ …”

His body rises, hand still clamped around her throat. He unbuckles his belt and shoves down his slacks.

His cock vaults out, thick veins throbbing and massive shaft _deep red,_ mean-looking head swollen and bruised purple and dribbling precum onto her thighs. His balls hanging heavy off his body ache, his hand shakes as he grasps himself at the base and lines up his cock with her tiny, clenching hole.

“Pa- Papa…”

Another volt of lightning strikes, he sees in strobes her laid out beneath him, spread thighs, little hands eclipsed by the big cuffs of his dark sleeves clutching his arm. He sees himself in the quicksilver surface of her beautiful glassine eyes.

Above their tent, thunder broils.

The wind howls, rain pelts their shelter in a roaring rush. They’re both panting, her trembling lips struggle to form words as tension fissures the air.

“Please,” she whispers. “You’re scarin’ me-”

“Am I, sweetheart?” he bows closer, his wild hair eclipsing one of his eyes as he dips until they share the same ragged, feral breath. _“Good.”_

Slowly, so that she feels every inch of his penetration, he presses forward and forces himself into her cunt.

It is the sweetest form of agony.

“No, don't, _stop_ …” she moans arcing, head tipped back by his thumb beneath her chin again, hyperextending her throat. Her mouth opens, she screams soundlessly up at the ceiling as her body quakes from the pain and from the shock. Her muscles, overtightened from her multiple climaxes, grip fluttering at his fat shaft as they wrench apart. They have no way to resist him, her soft, taut walls are drenched in her warm, succulent slick, the smell of which coats the air, making it thick to breathe. She is ripe for his taking.

He wants to freeze time.

“Or what, Rey?” his lips are so close to hers they brush when he speaks. He flexes his hand around her neck, making the tendons in his forearm strain up at his skin, and looks deeply into her eyes. Smirking.

“You’ll slit my throat?”

Beneath his thumb, her rabbit-pulse leaps and scrambles, her little star-eyes go preciously wide. Her thighs split open around his hips shake as she whimpers, “Wha-what?”

He smiles, a devil’s grin. “Oh my sweet girl. Don’t lie to Papa.”

He leans down and nuzzles her neck, savoring the way her whole small body begins to squirm under his. Caught to the hilt on his big, mean cock with his hand around her throat, she has nowhere to go.

“It will make your punishment so much worse,” he breathes in her ear, liquid and hot.

“No-” her breath stalls, she skitters one hand under her pillow above her and scrambles, only to come away with nothing at all.

Black triumph tips and pours down his spine and tingles electric inside his gut, igniting his desire and excitement, making him _burn._ “Not what you were expecting, little dove?”

Around his brutal girth, her cunny gushes and gulps. “I- I-”

“Shh,” he kisses her cheek.

And withdraws slowly from her tight, wet clutch.

She gasps and tenses, flinching and trembling hard when he presses more gentle kisses to her face, timing them with the fall of her tears to catch each one with his lush, reddened lips. Those he misses slip down her cheeks and roll over her temples. They seep into her hair and the cracks between her skin and his hand wrapped so lovingly around her neck.

The scent of wet salt takes him to ocean. The hot sleeve of her little body, the way she moans and lifts her hips, chasing the slow drag of his cock like a needy little cockslave, takes him to paradise.

The head of his cock and her breath catch inside her at same time.

“You’ve gone so long without love, haven’t you, angel?” she judders as he forces his way back, spreading apart her walls that tried to knit themselves together behind his retreat. “Left all alone on some savage little world-”

This time when he hilts, he grinds his hips, stirring himself inside her.

Her plump flesh squelches. She whimpers open-mouthed and tips back her head.

His hand abandons its brutal grip on her hip to brush back her hair, cradle her face in his palm. His eyes search every crease, ever flicker in her expression as his thumb strokes her cheek. “All that cruelty, all that _hunger,_ it’s made you feral. It’s made you _vulgar_. A furious, untamed soul. I _love it_ -”

She groans, low and wild in her throat, as his hips roll deeper against hers and the head of his cock bears mercilessly at her womb. Her slick rushes, coating his thick thatch of hair and her smooth, swollen mound, making their pelvises slip-slid together with his grind. Her eyes roll, the muscles in her poor little pussy gulp, seeking helplessly to draw him _even deeper_ , each time his public bone stimulates her clit.

She going to come soon, just from this. The unforgiving stretch of his cock inside her and the sensation of his body on hers. And his voice, the deep rolling timber breathed tenderly through his teeth.

“You are _perfection._ Rey-”

Lightning strobes and thunder crashes, the light quivering in its globe above throws their shapes as dark shadows against the tent wall. He sees himself bent over, holding her, he sees the loveliness of her small feet and calves draped over his back, toes pointed. The space where their bodies meet and become one.

“ _I_ am the answer to the question you’ve asked all your life. The one written in the scars on your body-” his hips draw back, his touch trails the small, hard planes of her side. He returns, quicker than before, but still slow and solid and harsh. A vicious, splitting caress to her insides. “The one you howl to the moon at night-”

She clenches him with her thighs as his lips press sweetly to her ear.

“Who loves you, Rey, my baby?”

Her eyes squeeze shut, her hands clamped for seeming eons around his forearm are suddenly in his hair at his nape. Her small arms hold him so tight.

So tight…

He pulls back and plunges in again as she cries, “Ahm’tage…”

“ _That's right_ ,” his hiss is breathless, venomous, as he snaps back and slams forward. Her body rocks, she screams as more thunder claps violently overhead.

He picks a brutal, punishing pace without warning, fucking her as fast as the wind barreling down the mountain, as hard as the crack of his heart against his ribs trying to get out. Her thick, beautiful slick sticks to his hair and his skin in long tendrils that web when he pulls away and squelch when he comes back. Head hanging in the violent circle of her arms, he sees the shadow of his mammoth cock moving in and out of her body, a glistening dark column splitting her delicate pink folds wide. The feeling of her is like no other, soft and lush and molten. Melded to him. Made _for_ him.

She is his wife. His feral desert beauty.

His only,  _only_ love.

“You will never be alone again, Rey,” his breath blasts in hot, snarling chuffs down her spine, making her pussy hold him harder every time, “ _I_ am your refuge… _I_ will shelter you… cherish you _…_ But you will… _obey me…”_

“Ahm’tage,” she sobs, clutching him. Her body bounces with each violent stroke, she scrabbles to hold him harder between her thighs, “I’m s-sor-ry…”

He fucks her with abandon, as if he’s trying to break through to the other side.

“You were… a bad girl… Rey,” his hand around her throat wrings her lightly, he snarls panting in time his thrusts, “that was… very naughty… taking… Papa’s knife-”

“I’m sorry!” she gasps squealing and squirming, wanting him closer, wanting him _out_ , “Please Papa, you’re hurting me!”

“ _Good_. You’ve been… a bad little girl,” finally, _finally,_ he raises his head and loosens up his grip just enough to force his thick thumb into her mouth. Hooking over her teeth, he presses down so that she is forced to tip her head and look him in the eye. Impossibly, her sweet fear makes his cock swell even larger. He feels his pulse knocking inside it, it’s veins mangle her as he fucks her for all he’s worth.

“Now lie still and take Papa’s cock.”

Her breath stalls. Even through his pleasure-haze, he can see the wheels behind her eyes turn. Her body embattled with her nature. Her longing to be free drowning in tide of her desire to make him master of all.

Then, her body slackens. She goes beautifully, sensually soft against the bedding and lets herself rock with his thrusts.

His heart roars and thrashes at his ribcage to reach her, his lips pull back over his teeth in a reaper’s grin as he quickens his pace and pistons into her _even harder._

She whimpers but doesn’t struggle.

He is delirious at her surrender. He _needs_ to come.

“Such a good little girl,” he praises rasping. As a reward, he takes her wholly into his arms.

His grip lifts her off their bedding, he sits back on his calves and the tangle of his slacks and uses his strong, lean thighs to continue thrusting furiously up into her lush, wet cunt. Her small arms cling to his neck, her breasts slick and glistening with sweat press to his chest through his undershirt. His arm around her waist beneath his dress shirt she still wears guides her up and down his cock, his other hand he wraps up in her long, loose hair. Her slip runs hot and creamy down his sac hanging heavy between his legs, her thighs squeeze his hips bruisingly tight. Otherwise, she hangs in his arms like a doll.

“Look at you, sweet one,” he holds her like a child, head cradled in the crook of his palm, as all the blood in his body beats just below the surface of his skin, “Such a good girl for Papa. All gentled down-”

“Papa,” she whimpers, lashes fluttering, mouth open in a wet, humid pant. Her tears drip freely down her cheeks. “It’s so big… it _hurts_ … _please_ come. _Please,_ Papa…”

His gut clenches, he feels his thighs tense, his balls draw up closer to his body and pulse.

“You want Papa to fill up your little pussy with come?"

“Yes!” she nods frantic, eyes closed, face tipped up to his, “Please Papa, _please_ fill up my pussy, fill me up-”

His arm around her waist sides down her glinting, perfect body for his hand to take her hip in a brutal grip. His pistons deepen with shorter strokes, he hammers her soft cervix as his breath becomes snarling and erratic through his gritted teeth. His girl whines and cries out pitifully, holding onto his shoulders with her hands swallowed up by his cuffs as her teeth click together with the force of his mean thrusts.

His heartrate bursts through the ceiling, past the cool prismed light, and soars out into the raging storm as he strains up off his heels and buries his shout in the crook of her neck and _comes_.

He comes and comes and _comes._ Pounding pulses of scalding liquid ache. His eyes roll back, his toes curl until they crack, he convulses so hard he can’t tell if he’s still up on his knees or in a shamble on the tent floor. His soul comes out of his body, he loses all sense of time.

He _loves_ this girl.  _Completely._ With all he is.

The thought glimmers in the light of the globe lamp as he comes down from his high with her tucked in at his side.

Their tent simmers in the scent of their lovemaking, her light salted fragrance mixed with his heavier musk. The air is humid, warm from their bodies and their shared heavy panting. Thunder rolls softly in the distance as rain _ratta-tap-taps_ their love nest.

After he finds his body again, remembers how to use his limbs, work his jaw, he lays between her raw, pink thighs and laps up his come.

The flesh of her poor sex is red and beating like a heart, her abused little hole a wet mesh leaking white. He bathes her slowly in long soft laps of his tongue. His hands holding the cheeks of her ass shake slightly, when he has finished his feast, he packs her opening with thick pats of bacta cream then slathers her thighs and her mound. The tips of her fingers trail delicately over his face while he works, she studies his features from beneath her damp lashes as if seeing him for the first time.

He feeds her sips of cool water with her wrapped in a blanket and set in his lap, head tipped back against his naked chest, eyes closed, licking her lips between soft swallows. Letting him chase what trickles from the corners of her mouth with his thumb.

“Ahm’tage? Are you still mad at me?” she whispers hoarsely as he lays her down beside him on their bed still damp from their lovemaking. He is too exhausted to do anything but rest.

“Never,” he smoothes his big palm over her hair. “I was never cross with you, treasure…”

They’re both twilighting, drifting beneath the swaying glow like tendrils at the bottom of the sea.

 _Perhaps I’ll take her to the ocean,_ he thinks as sleep starts to pull her velvet veil over his eyes. He pictures a watercolor scene of kneeling in the sand, showing her how to dig for shells.

“-kiss me?” he hears her say from a lightyear away.

He bows his head as she turns hers up, like a seedling seeking the sun.

Their lips find the other’s face first, hers on his chin, his on the bridge of her nose. Finally, their mouths meet.

They kiss each other to sleep.

 

 

 

 

He dreams he is racing his father’s black mare down the beach, churning up crescendos of white sand with her dark hooves behind him, the salt winds roaring off the ocean stinging his eyes and carding through his hair.

_Freedom._

 

 

It is the best dream he has ever had.

 

 

 

 

 

“ _Wake up_!”

His girl is screaming, wrenching frantically at his arm.

The roaring of the ocean melds into the savage whine of the warning call programed into the satellite terminal. The sound blares from the speakers he’s set up around the meadow and deep enough into the woods he can hear them when he hunts.

But even louder is Rey’s shrill, “He’s here! Ahm’tage _wake up he's here!”_

_Impossible._

His hearts stops and restarts.

He leaps like a sprung trap to his feet.

“Ahm’tage…” his wife is sobbing, true terror like he’s never seen on her face twisting every one of her features as she wrings the leg of his sleep pant from her knees. “Oh god he’s gonna kill us Ahm’ta-hage…”

“We have to get the ship,” already, he’s slipped his holster over his naked shoulder and clicked on his swordbelt. In one fast, fluid motion he bends down and lifts her limp and paralyzed body off the tent floor and slings her over his back. His fingerprint unlocks his blastgun, he hears its core ignite as he counts down deftly how many seconds have passed since he woke.

Already, Ren's ship would have breached the atmosphere.

He gives her one quick hitch to center her weight over his shoulder before he bursts blastgun-leading into the raging night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so cliffhanger.
> 
> If you've read a few of my other works, you know my to favorite kinds of scenes are sex and action. I had to give Tage and Kylo's first confrontation its own chapter. 
> 
> Also, random unsolicited sidebar: Pastel has been going through it lately, and I want to take a moment to tell everyone who leaves positives comments on my chapters *how much* it motivates and encourages me, not just as a creator but as a person. You have no idea the beautiful impact your comments have on my heart, and I hope so much that my gratitude comes through to you in my replies.
> 
> And-and, though this Reyux/Rux comm is small and sometimes super-quiet, it is also so. sweet. So so sweet. Respectful, reciprocal, kind. I am thrilled be in this space creating content for you beautiful people.
> 
> If you enjoyed this chapter, please kudo or leave a comment below!


	8. And on a dark, cold night / Under full moonlight / He flies into a fog / Like a vulture in the sky...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fuckery. Absoluuute fuckery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys are... there are just no words to describe how beautiful, supportive, and kind you all are. Thank you to *everyone* who reached out in the comments of the last chapter. Writing and chatting with you all is putting the pep back into my step <3

Immediately his sight is assaulted by the wind rushing icy torrents of rain down the mountain.

It slicks his bare skin and soaks his sleep pants and his dress shirt he pulled over his wife’s naked body, it plasters his hair and chills him to the bone. His fringe offers meager shelter for his eyes searching the darkness through the dripping strands. The night is pitch-blinding, there is no light in the clearing and he dare not strike one. Their lite-craft is cloaked by his coding from the Empire’s sonar detection software, but _they_ are vulnerable to pinpointed infrascan.

With no immediate solid shelter, they are as naked as babes in the woods.

He listens.

There is nothing but the feral drum of the rain and his wife’s whimpers and his own thundering heart.

He kicks into a sprint in the direction of his workbench, closing by memory the thirty meter distance. The ground squelches coldly between his bare toes, waterlogged earth absorbs the sound of his impact as his hard strikes kick back muck and small stones. Rey’s weight dangles helplessly over the strong arc of his shoulder. His thighs _burn_ , the freezing rain pummels his sinuses and numbs his face, but he wrenches steadily what air he can out of the whipping wind as he tears a straight path for the tarp that covers his Force-neutralizing vest.

Without it, he is a dead man.

He still can’t fathom _how_ they were found-

They are almost at the bench, only three meters out, when his wife _screams._

_“Watch out!”_

In the same heartbeat he catches a flash of green light out of the corner of his eye, he rears back and slip-stumbles down to the waterlogged ground as laser fire rips past him, dragging the air with it.

Light energy connects with the core reactor in his vest as the blast strikes the bench, blue fissuring light mushrooms towards the sky and reflects in the surface of his eyes.

He tears his wife off his back and throws her down into the soft muck to shield her with his body just as the blowback roars over them.

Searing heat and sharp shrapnel still glowering from the impact rips out over the meadow, he grits his teeth as his bare back is branded and snarls when shrapnel takes a bite from his shoulder where Rey had just been.

Over the high ring in his ears, he hears the delayed screech of the blast and the TIE Fighters swooping roaring above them as they engage the battlefield. Their percussion swallows up his wife’s terrified screams, he covers her mouth with a mud-streaked hand and listens fiercely to the patterns of roars crescendo and fade. They’re a small tactical unit, fifteen Fighters at most.

His heart thuds dully, calmly, against his ribs as he waits for his opening, a window when the Fighters are too far from the ground for accurate aim.

Finding it, he wrenches them up from the muck and aims his blastgun up at the night.

His fire ripples green light over the blast-shield of a TIE Fighter a hundred meters above.

Return fire changes their strike patterns, he knows because he designed their combat maneuvers himself. In the span of a breath, they scramble, moving into a hook pattern with the rear Fighters flanking his left to herd them with scattershot toward the lead coming in low on his right.

A clever trap for the uninitiated.

With their ship still forty meters dead ahead, he snatches out like a snake to snare his wife by her upper arm and drag her to his forward-left where his unarmored body can offer her the most protection. Then he opens fire on his right.

The lead Fighter’s shields are disengaged to enable precision fire, his first shot strikes its center body where its armor is the strongest.

But that is only to light up the night.

His rapid second and third rounds find the Fighter’s vulnerable soffit. Its entire left wing catches fire and sends it side-barreling screaming into the woods. It explodes on impact into a shower of flaming shrapnel that sets even the rain-drenched forest ablaze.

The Fighters scramble screeching to regroup into defensive formation, but it’s already too late for their beta. The lead gave away its position and now he knows its path.

His arm slices upwards through the rain to follow its trajectory, he lets loose a lightning succession of rounds that strike its underbelly and short-circuit its shields. It wrenches in the sky and dives groaning, clipping one of its wingmen and sending them spiraling around one other in a crash-landing that ends in a white-hot explosion at the opposite end of the meadow. Their blowback rips out across the plain as his wife gapes, “Holy fuckin’ _shit_.”

Now there are thirteen Fighters.

He’s won against worse odds.

“ _Run_ ,” he snarls, already sprinting them to their ship with his hand clamped like a steel band around her arm.

The Fighters go into frenzy above them, swooping and scattering laser shot that strobes blinding hot light and tears up the field. Their thundering roars and the bright lights confuse and panic his wife, she looks screaming everywhere but their goal now within twenty meters. Her bare feet accustomed to gripping sand-coarsed surfaces slip on the soaked grass, she goes down ten meters from the ramp to their ship.

As fast as he can, he opens fire at the sky to provide cover, spitting flashes of laser in a wide, deadly arc that forces the fleet to fall back.

“Ahm’tage!” his wife’s screams are lost in the percussion, her nails rake him as her grip slip-slides around his bare, wet arms when he lunges double-handed to reach her. He has to fight his way through her thrashing just to grasp her waist.

He hears the Fighters doubling back towards the clearing in attack formation, and in that moment, he simply knows.

They’re not both going to make it in time.

“Head straight for the ship, Rey,” he barks the order over the black cacophony as he whiplashes her to her feet, “Don’t look back, I’ll hold them off-”

Her nails _dig_ into his biceps as she clings screaming and shaking her head, “No I’m not leavin’ you no-”

“ _Yes you are_ ,” he wrenches her off him and shoves her savagely towards their ship, snarling, “Now do as I tell you and _go-”_

“ _Ahm’tage_!” she screams as lightning flashes, webbing outwards like skeleton fingers across the roiling dark sky. The hairs on the back of his nape stand on-end.

_He’s here._

Time itself seems to hold its breath as the meadow plunges into coldness.  A dark, sinister wind snicks through the burning edge of the forest. Behind him, his wife goes completely still.

“Do- do you see that?” she whimpers.

In the near distance, above the treetops, he can see it – a shape sluicing slowing through the currents lead by its fang-tipped wings. Its cyclopes eye glowers red in the center of its body, transparisteel backlit by infralight.

His heartrate kicks over, the adrenaline simmering low in his gut combusts.

In one lightning-strike move, he holsters his blaster and bends at the knee to sling his wife up and across his back shoulder-to-shoulder all as he breaks into an all-out dead run. The night cackles behind him, followed by a roaring unlike the other Fighters and line of red laser fire that craters the soil behind him and burns as hot as a sun. _Fast-er fast-er fast-er_ the balls of his feet beat his mantra into the mud until he sprints so fast they hardly touch the ground at all.

His knee hits the base of the ship ramp hard enough he hears it _crunch_ just as a red charge of light cracks the ground where his last footprint was left. The blowback drags his wife off his shoulders and throws her up ahead of him onto the ship’s floor.

 _“CLOSE THE DOOR!”_ he roars, unholstering his blaster.

He rolls across the incline onto his back in time to see Ren’s Fighter ripping ground-level over the clearing straight for them.

Gritting his teeth, he opens fire. His laser blast makes Ren pull up at the last second and punch towards the sky.

“ _Rey now_ -”

Sobbing faster than she can take in air and screeching, she scrambles wide-eyed and quaking to slam her palm on the switch for the firewall.

“ _C’mon, Tage!”_ she screeches, _“_ C’mon c’mon _c’mon!”_

He vaults snarling through the knifing pain and sickening _click_ in his kneecap to the top of the ramp and throws himself just in time beneath the closing door.

“Andromeda,” he’s barking at his program before he is even up off the floor.

Her smooth, androgynous voice greets him evenly, _“Welcome. Please place your hand on the screen.”_

“Voice override,” he lifts his wife where she is sobbing screaming on her hands and knees by the switch panel and carries her swiftly to the jumpseat bolted into the back of their small craft, “alternate identification code _delta-island-nebula-alpha-helix-thirteen-thirty-nine._ General Armitage Hux.”

_“Welcome, Armitage.”_

“Engage impact shields-”

“No no no-” Rey scrambles moaning, trying to clutch onto him as he makes fast work of the buckles on her harness. Her nails leave angry red welts across his wet bare chest, despite her shaking she fights the restraint for all she’s worth, “No I wanna stay with you don’t-”

“Prepare ancillary thrusters for vertical launch, reinforce radar deception and switch broadband to the Imperial frequency- shh shh shh, Rey, my darling-” he bears back at the urge to slap her still as the ship _whirrs_ through an arc that points its view-shield up at the night.

Gravity shifts, he braces his foot not knifing pain up his side on the wall by her seat to keep his weight off of her as he speaks softly and secures the last strap over her lap, “Be still angel, it’s almost over-“

Long soaked tendrils of her hair fall back from her face as her body sinks back into the jumpseat. She digs her fingers into his shoulders and babbles, “I wanna stay with you Ahm’tage I wanna stay no don’t go no no please don’t go _don’t go_ _Ahm’tge stay_!”

She thrashes and bleats like a lamb caught in barbed wire as he pushes off the wall and turns. The Sith will be circling back with his fleet now that they’ve given away their ship.

“Andromeda,” his long strides swallow up the short steep incline to the open cockpit, he uses his grip on the headrest of the captain’s chair to haul himself into his seat. His weight triggers the chair to bring him forward, he locks into the dashboard lit up with a hundred flashing colored lights. His hands, like his voice, are swift and steady as he takes the controls, “Scan for Imperial ships within this system.”

_“Scanning for Imperial craft now…”_

On the main grid-screen, fourteen lite-Fighters as well as a large ominous shape orbiting like a vulture just outside Alyseaa’s exosphere appear. The large ship he knows is as a Star Destroyer, within its hangers are a thousand more Fighters waiting to be deployed.

“Prepare the perimeter, set a course for Regency,” he watches the fleet on his grid-screen encircle his craft as deftly he slips his own harness over his shoulders. Their sequence is a standard net-maneuver, designed to snare small craft as one cinches the strings of a sack to trap an animal inside.

A single Fighter hovers waiting above the others. He knows it’s the Sith.

“Pedestrian _,”_ he mutters as an overlay flashes on-screen. A series of separate dots that form a ring around the clearing.

He has rigged the forest to explode.

“On my count, Andromeda,” he grips the launch thrusters in both his hands and watches the fleet close rank on the clearing. His wife’s screams for him fill their cabin and wrench his heart.

But he can’t very well win a battle with her clambering in his lap.

He has to time this perfectly, “Three… two… _detonate-”_

He forces the boosters forward and launches the ship just as the Fighters fall into range.

The roar of the thrusters are eclipsed by a seismic sound like the world splitting apart. Their craft judders, his tendons strain in his forearms as he bears back on the thrusters to keep them from collapsing as their ship tears through the fiery blowback of ten tons of light-core explosives detonating at once. His chest aches, sternum pressing inward with the pressure, pushing the air out of his lungs.

Once their out of the blast range he shouts at Andromeda, “Drop boosters and engage combat mode-”

The craft rockets upward as the weight of their launch boosters fall away, they tear through the clouds spiking with lightning into the clear, silent night. His grid-screen changes from green to red as his impact shields peel back over his forward and rear canons and his combat indicators light up the dash, the ship levels over a plain of silver-white cloudfloor lit by a full moon and the light of the crystalline stars.

Just as he suspected, the Sith’s Fighter is waiting for him above the clouds. His curved viewshield gleams like the facet of a red diamond under the mercurial light.

Over his shoulder, his wife sees the Sith hovering above the cloudfloor and screams, “It’s _him_ Tage, _it’s him_ he’s gonna shoot the ship-”

“Not with you on it,” he murmurs below his breath, already switching his canons to _on_ and priming the compressor for hyperspeed with measured, lightning-fast flicks of his hand. Their second set of ancillary thrusters need five minutes to charge before they can make the jump.

He clicks the switch that bathes the cockpit in ultra-white light and flips on the communique above him, then reaches past it for the compartment that holds his tobacco and rolling papers and his light.

“Ren,” he speaks smoothly, letting the mic set into the dash pick up his voice. He knows the Sith can see him inside the lit cockpit against an ocean of silvery dark.

 _“Hux-”_ Ren’s voice booms back furiously over the airwaves.

Over his shoulder, Rey thrashes and shrieks.

He can practically hear the Sith slavering into the mic as he roars, _“I am going to rip you limb from limb you cocksucking son of a whore-”_

Hux runs coolly the tip of his tongue along the edge of his rolling paper before he speaks over Ren, “I shall thank you to mind your language in front of my wife, Supreme Leader.”

Ren _rages_ as he cups his smoke and lights it, his eyes flicker to the countdown on the dash as he takes a long, calming drag.

_Four minutes._

Heat crackles in his lungs, a familiar, centering sort of ache as Rey whimpers and mewls out behind him, “Tage…”

 _“Rey-”_ the Sith’s voice breaks over the comm waves, though whether it’s from emotion or interference he can’t tell, _“Rey i- tha- you?”_

Hux blows out a long stream of smoke through his nose, voice darker and more dangerous as he answers, “She doesn’t want to speak with you, Ren. Your days of tormenting her are over.”

_“Rey ba-y you need to get o- that ship-”_

“Though I am curious-” he continues conversationally as slowly he maneuvers the ventral canon so that its aim overlays the Sith’s ship on his grid-screen, cigarette tucked cleanly into the corner of his mouth, “however did you find our little love nest?”

_“Hol- on Rey I-   -oming to get y- “_

His long pale hands eclipse the joystick as a tongue of smoke unfurls from his reptile grin. “Now why would she want that?”

He punches forward and opens fire.

The attack forces Ren to barrel sideways, they roar past him, tearing across the cloudfloor faster than the speed of sound. The sonic boom from their blast-off rattles the viewshield, Rey screams at the top of her lungs.

On the grid-screen, Hux sees Ren has recovered and is racing to catch up. His Fighter is better equipped for battle, his piloting skills are a legend across the Galaxy.

But he is no strategist.

 _Three minutes,_ the countdown says.

He checks the topographical map then throws them forward into a straight dive that takes them ripping through the clouds into the eye of the raging storm. A hundred meters below, the forest rushes up to meet them.

On his screen he sees the Sith is right behind.

“Tage we’re gonna crash!” his wife screeches.

“No we are not,” he murmurs around his cigarette as he wrenches back on the thrusters.

A stream of pale smoke winds around the cockpit with his long exhale as they level off with the treetops. The forest splits apart and bows beneath their underbelly as they race so close to the canopy the Sith’s sensors can’t lock on their position. He aims their rear canon and fires a spray of blastshot Ren has to weave to avoid.

On his grid-screen Hux notices the presence of a hundred more Fighters moving fast through Alyseaa’s exosphere.

_Two minutes._

His heart kicks over, he takes another long drag and this time lets the smoke pour again through his flaring nostrils before calmly smirking over the comm, “Calling for reinforcements, are you? The single greatest Force-user in the Galaxy can’t subdue a simple lite-craft. My my, what would your dear Grandpapa say?”

_“TRAITOR! You’re a dead man, Hux-”_

“Hardly,” he rolls right suddenly then wrenches, soaring belly-up in an arc over the Sith’s ship scrambling to stay on his tail. Ash drips past his face towards the ceiling and falls back like grey rain as he rights them behind Ren’s tail. The Fighters are closing in on them, he sees dozens of indicators racing closer through the concentric rings on his grid-screen as he weaves to keep Ren in his sights.

Behind him, Rey is silent. Her eyes are closed, his rain-drenched dress shirt is shining with sick. She’s ash-faced and gripping the lip of her seat for dear life.

 _“There’s nowhere to run, Hux,”_ Ren’s voice seethes over the comm wave and Rey digs deeper into her seat, _“I chipped her with nanotracers the day I brought her back to Base-”_

Hux’s gut drops away from him.

He has the sensation of falling down, down, down through the floor of the ship into the forest beyond.

_Nanotracers..._

A billion particles inside her bloodstream transmitting a microwave signal strong enough to be detected within a single system length. Irremovable... Immutable...

She is forever marked.

 _“-nothing you can scramble, nothing for you to_ corrupt- _it’s over, Hux,”_ the Sith snarls.

His vision greys out at the edges then collapses inwards, distorting his view of the grid-screen as his knuckles whiten around the controls. He tastes his heartbeat, metal and sulfur. It throbs in the back of his throat.

His wife begins to sob.

_“Even if you escape me now, there’s nowhere for you to hide. I will find her-”_

The legion of Fighters is on top of them, there is only a minute left before they jump. Without a clear shot at the stars, they risk striking another ship and smashing themselves to pieces.

He cares nothing for that as he turns back in his seat.

His wife is sunk into hers, holding herself hysterically with one arm around her little waist. Her other hand is clamped down on her nape.

 _Of course_ , he realizes as his heartbeat grows even louder to his ears. The incision above her barcode, the one she swore she couldn’t remember what it was from.

“You knew,” he says quietly, meeting her frightened eyes.

It is not a question.

“Ta-ha-age-” she tries, but she is crying too violently to speak.

 _“Give her to me,”_ the Sith’s voice drips scaled and venomous through the speakers, like a viper slithering into a valley through the mist, _“and I’ll let you go.”_

The viewshield rattles with the g-force drag of the TIE Fighters ripping screaming through the air around them. They swoop and dive, blocking all possible exits as he and the Sith continue to race over the treetops through the rain, Andromeda correcting the steering via autolock on Ren's ship.

 _“Launch to hyperspeed in T-minus twenty seconds,”_ Andromeda reminds him serenely.

He hears her not.

He is looking at his wife.

She looks frightened out of her mind, wild with terror and grief. But he has to be certain-

White smoke shrouds his cold glower, his cigarette caught in the corner of his mouth hardly moves at all as he asks, “Did you want him to find you?”

“N-oh!” her voice catches. Breathless and hiccupping, she shakes her head.

_Well, then._

That’s good enough for him.

“Andromeda,” he turns his seat and switches off the communique before he stubs out his cigarette on the dash, “redirect power from the main cabin to supercharge the transmitter, frequency one-one-oh-one-oh. Increase transmission to two hundred thousand volts and standby.”

_“Charging transmitter. T-minus ten seconds to launch.”_

His hands again grip the steering, he peels them off Ren’s tail and wrenches them up into the sky.

He weaves their ship through the legions of Fighters, ripping and sideswiping as the Sith loops beneath them and rockets to catch up. The others follow, like a fisherman with a dragnet behind his ship, more Fighters rush into the wake of his trajectory up through the cloud ceiling into the gleaming night.

“On my signal,” he closes the circuit on their radio feedback and takes them off the Imperial frequency. “Rey, cover your ears.”

She claps her hands over her head and tucks in her chin as they soar a hair’s breadth past another TIE Fighter. There are only a few more above them.

In the distance, he sees the Star Destroyer looming above the cloudfloor.

_“Launching in five… four…”_

“Discharge now.”

A massive blue wave of static roils out from their transmitter in every direction as it seeks out the receivers of every ship in the stratosphere. Feedback screeches, not from their speakers but from the Fighters so loudly it is as if the sound is coming from inside their bones.

His ears pound, he watches Fighters veer and slam into one other as Ren’s ship spirals to narrowly avoid a collision all while their lite-craft pulls out of range.

_“Two… launching now.”_

He feels the telltale lurch in his gut that signals a jump to hyperspeed, a jolt of turbulence sinks him deep into his seat as they careen on a now-clear path into the rapidly blurring landscape of stars.

He hears his wife let out a gasping sob and before it is even safe to do so, he is out of his harness and up from his chair, crossing swiftly and unsteadily down the cabin incline to get to her.

“Tage!”

She wrenches loose the last buckle and throws herself sobbing into his arms as he catches himself from slamming into her just in time. They go down on the floor of the cabin together, a tangle of sweat and sticky bile and grasping, shaking limbs. His knee throbs. His chest is so tight he can feel the inward press of each rib on his heart.

“M’so sorry!” she bleats into his neck. Her arms wring him so hard he can scarcely, scarcely draw breath. “So so sorry Am’tage-”

He strokes and rocks her and holds her to his chest. “It’s alright now angel, everything’s alright…”

It isn’t. No matter where he takes her, the Sith will come. All his carefully laid plans, his preparations for revolution, are shattered. Laid to waste.

He has no hope of building an army to stand against the Empire if they are constantly on the run.

And he is no man’s outlaw.

But none of that matters just now, when his girl is alive and safe inside his arms.

“We’re alright, my love,” he kisses her wet, mottled part and crushes his cheek to her crown.

They rock, rock against the raging storm that is to come.

“We’re alright…”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully I was able to convey the action well in this sequence. It's a complex problem to make the descriptions clear, fast-paced and visceral while keeping the emotional tension at the fore. Thank you so much for letting me practice more of this style within this work - I really enjoy writing these kinds of scenes : D
> 
> Oh.
> 
> And a few of you may be wondering, what exactly it is about Kylo Ren that makes him worse than Armitage? The answer is: nothing. Nothing at all, my fine friends.
> 
> Rey just prefers Tage's face. 
> 
> Have a gorgeousable day or night wherever you are, and if you enjoyed this, please let me know!


	9. I Am Stuck On Band-Aids But They're Not Stuck On Me!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You didn't come here for lengthy descriptions of rolling hillsides and political landscapes, long-drawn pillow talks or filler scenes, talk-therapy sessions or redemption arcs.
> 
> That's what Disney's for.
> 
> You came here for PastelWonder.
> 
> And baby. I'm gonna give it to yah.

The ship is freezing, he can observe his breath wafting up like faint smoke into the silent, cycling air.

The bulk of their power source was taken by the frequency blast that scrambled Ren’s Fighters, the rest must be used to carry them at hyperspeed through the stars. A small auxiliary cell is all that remains to power the main cabin. It is hardly enough to keep the temperature survivable. Their clean water supply is nearly finished, what light there is glowers low from a single section of the console and from the faint haze through the viewshield of a thousand blurred suns.

There is no other option, they must stay their course to the Regency Sector.

To Arkanis.

Of all the loathsome, putrid cesspools in the Galaxy, he had hoped he would never have to return _there_.

“Andromeda,” he speaks lowly so as not to wake his wife. She is tucked away inside their bunk, sleeping beneath a bundle of bedding and his Imperial greatcoat, his pillow clutched in her arms. Her thumb brushes her lower lip as if to slip in and soothe her at any moment. She's had no night terrors, thank the Maker.

Still, occasionally she calls out for him in her sleep. 

His knee aches. He lets his head hang down and keeps his hands braced on the dash as slowly he lunges into another deep stretch. He is dressed in his final set of clean slacks and dark undershirt that molds to the muscles in his chest and shows the impressions of the bandages wrapped around his midsection. He has a burn which spans from the bottom of his shoulder blades down to his low back, and a gash on his shoulder the width of his finger that wouldn’t close until he cauterized it with a laser blade from the ship’s repair kit. What precious little bacta solution they had left he applied liberally to his wife’s cuts and abrasions before spreading the dredges over his own.

His entire body aches in a way it hasn’t since the Felucian Wars. And back then, he was a younger man.

But that is not what concerns him most.

“Have you received any word from the Hutts?”

Above the console, a small holographic sphere distorts as if from static as it reports, _“My resources indicate that – Fomo, the Hutt – along with – Kangiklub, Ravo Nova, and the Guavian Death Gang – have surrendered evidence of our communication channels to the Empire and are working with Imperial forces to locate and reclaim - Rey of Jakku – and to eradicate – Hux, Brendol Armitage.”_

So his tacit supporters have deserted him, then.

He snorts through a grimace. “Of course they have, profligate scum. What else have you found?”

_“An open contract submitted by – Captain Gwyneth Phasma, of the First Imperial Forces – on behalf of – Supreme Leader Kylo Ren and the Grand Galactic Empire – on – Centax, Month Seven, twenty-seven AB – to all law enforcement agencies and private citizens for the head of – Hux, Brendol Armitage – to be returned to – Imperial Base zero one.”_

“How- theatrical-” he grunts through a move that makes the tissue around his kneecap burn as if on fire.

Relaxing his muscles, he pants lightly with palms still planted against the dash. “Well? For how much?”

_"One hundred billion Core credits.”_

The price of a small Core world.

“For that much I’m tempted to lop it off myself,” he pushes off the console and lowers himself carefully into the captain’s seat by its arms.

His head aches, he closes his eyes and presses in his fingertips to bear back against the constant throb.

He is dying for a cigarette.

But the ventilation system is already too taxed.

“What about the sample I gave you for analysis?” he dreads the answer even as he asks.

 _“I have finished running diagnostics,”_ the sphere revolves itself then spreads to show him a holographic representation of two entities tightly bound. _“As you suspected, the nanoparticles are a synthetic organic compound and have bonded to the subject’s white blood cells. Attempting to remove them via antiserum will trigger an automatic immune response.”_

“You’re saying she would become very ill if I tried,” he studies the model closely.

_“My algorithm predicts it would be fatal, yes.”_

Defeated, he slumps back. “I see.”

He props his elbow on the arm of the chair and rests his chin in the crook above his thumb. He folds his fingers against his lips and closes his eyes.

He sits that way for a long time.

 _“Armitage,”_ his system sounds curious rather than concerned, ever-neutral to his plights, _“are you still there?”_

“I am. I’m thinking,” he isn’t, not really. His thoughts are too many and fast-moving to grasp. They slip through his fingers like fine grains of sand through an hourglass.

They are out of time.

“What you thinkin’ about?” the voice is not Andromeda’s.

It is sleep-rough and anything but neutral. Anxious and small.

He opens his eyes. "Andromeda?"

_"Yes, Armitage?"_

“I want a search for communique code _alpha-nine-nine-oh-two-hundred._ Start with the obscure frequencies in the Outer Rim.”

 _“Initiating search,”_ the sphere says before he powers down the console and turns his chair.

His wife is bundled up like a little tauntaun rider and sitting on her heels at the edge of their bed. Just her face peeks from her swaddling, framed by the downturned collar of his coat. He has no more rations to feed her, and only a little clean water for her to sip before they land.

Shame burns his insides as softly he coaxes, “Go back to sleep, little one. Lie down and rest.”

“Aren’t we there yet?” she asks through a yawn as she rubs her eyes with her fists.

“Nearly. Just a few hours more,” he traces her features, pale from a deep sleep except for her nose that’s rosy from cold. She looks as if she could use another week’s worth of rest.

They both could.

“Will he be waitin’ there, do you think?” she whispers, holding tighter her bundle around her shoulders. Pale starlight moves across her big, beautiful eyes still glossy from yawning. Her hair on one side stands practically on-end.

“No,” he shakes his head, “not when we land.”

She watches him for a moment, then lets the blankets fall back so that she can give a tentative stretch. Her chest lifts, she strains her small hands up and back over her shoulders as her little socked feet slip out from beneath her bum and dangle sweetly above the floor.

“Then you lie down, Tage-pa,” she pats their pallet, “I'll watch the stars.”

He smiles, softly. “Thank you. But I have a better idea-”

His knee aches, his back is _killing_ him, but he stands with affected ease and walks steadily to where she’s watching him through her lashes from their bunk. 

“Will you lie with me for bit?” he sits beside her, trying not to wince. There's a sudden shooting pain up his left side, from which injury he has no idea.

“My mind is racing,” he lets his eyes close as he rubs his temples, “I can’t quite seem to shut it off.”

“Really?” he feels rather than sees her shift up onto her knees, “Do you want me to kiss it?”

His lips twitch, neurons firing in several different directions at once as he slits open his gaze. “Kiss what?”

“Your _mind,_ stupid squeak-mouse,” she scoffs. She takes his good shoulder for balance and batts his hand away. “Hold still, yeah?”

“As you say, Misses Hux.”

Her small, dry lips light urgently upon one temple, then the other, along his forehead and in the space between his brow. Around his orbital bone, upon his lashes. Exact, tender touches that make a shadow of a sound. Like a kiss from miles away.

It makes his chest hurt with a very different kind of wound.

“Thank you,” he murmurs. He finds her bright eyes watching him with grave concern.

“Is your brain better now?” she curls her fingers around his shoulder and against his heart.

Always clutching on, his girl.

He nods slowly. “Much.”

“My mama always kissed me where I was hurt. I think,” she says it so softly he hardly hears her, studying her small white fingers twined within his dark shirt.

He lifts her chin, strums her lower lip with his thumb. “Of course she did, sweet angel. How could she not?”

Her mouth trembles. She buries her face in his neck.

He takes her wholly into his arms and lies down with her, arranging them so that his back is to the cabin and her small body is cocooned in his warmth. The pallet is still warm from her body heat, she tangles her feet with his calves and tucks her cold little nose against his throat. He drags the blankets over them then wraps himself around her, ignoring the painful stretch in his shoulder wound and along his burn. His thoughts still race each other like children, too many probabilities and calculations running parallel at once.

He shuts his eyes and tries to focus on the warm tide of her breath upon his neck.

_In and out… in and out…_

He has just begun to slip below sleep’s still surface when he hears her.

“Thank you, for not leavin’ me behind.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“He was _raising an army_ -”

Against the glowing blue screen-surface of the high table, Ren rams his massive black fist. The monitor splits into a web then shatters inward, its backlight sputters and goes out.

Around the room, his war generals and cabinet ministers shift uncomfortably in their curved leather chairs. Only Captain Phasma remains unstirred in her seat to his right. Her helmet is off, cool clear eyes roving slowly over the faces in the room. Her chrome armor glints like a knife under the blue-hued lights.

Ren stands above all of them at the head of the high table, snarling seething like a savage. His eyes are bloodshot, his nostrils flaring. His chest heaves with every frothing breath. He bares his teeth at the room and clenches his gloved hands until the banded leather shrieks. His body _quakes_ with rage.

“None of you knew,” his voice roils, a black tempest over the thrashing ocean. His black eyes prowl over the members of cabinet as his Darkness swoops like the unseen shadow of Death over their minds, “that General Hux was committing high treason. That he was infiltrating our systems and siphoning billions of credits from the State. That he was stock-piling weapons and war ships and shaking hands with our enemies behind our backs. He sat in _this room,_ moved in _your circles,_ and plotted a revolution. And you - tell me - _none of you_ knew? You are lying. All of you.”

He straightens. “I will execute every last one of you, if I have to. But I will hear the _truth._ ”

A ripple of fear undulates across the room.

“Supreme Leader,” it is his eldest member, a state chancellor from the reign of his grandfather, who speaks up calmly from his seat to Ren’s left, “with great respect, I must offer a point of clarification.”

Ren’s arms bulge beneath his surcoat as he crosses them. Without the General in the room, his height is matchless. He is a monolith among the anxious women and men.

Solemnly, he gestures, “Speak.”

The chancellor inclines his head. “With regards to the accusation that we at this table lacked suspicion about the General’s possible _ulterior motives,_ I would remind His Majesty that we were very much lead by example.”

There are quiet murmurs and hesitant nods around the room.

 “Oh?” Ren’s eyes narrow, but his tone his deceptively soft, “Whose lead would that be, Chancellor?”

“Why yours, Your Supreme Darkness,” the chancellor adjusts his thin-frame spectacles with a convivial smile that does not reach his eyes, “It was you who appointed General Hux to his post as High Commander against our counsel. At the time, we the cabinet were unnerved by your nomination, if you recall.”

Ren grinds his animus between his teeth and spits, “I do not. Remind me.”

“We felt that while the General was indeed an exemplary soldier, he lacked a certain… impartiality which we found disconcerting. His political views were characterized by several psychological examiners as _radical_ and _antithetical_. One even went so far as to describe him as _an orthodox autocrat in the extreme_. When we tried to bring this… unsettling information to your attention, you said-”

The chancellor’s hand pans at his fellow members, “Appointments were none of our concern.”

More subtle whispers of assent and nodding of heads.

Ren’s gut roils.

 _Deceiver,_ the Darkness whispers in his ear, _He is a toad among maggots, slurping up the flies that rise off the rot…_

The temperature in the room drops noticeably.

But the chancellor continues, “You felt that the great bond which had existed between his father, Brendol Senior, and your late grandfather, Lord Vader, was evidence enough of the fealty between your two families,” he steeples his fingertips and speaks peering over his glasses around the room, “and when we argued that the brutal slaughter of his patriarch might suggest that the young general had _divergent loyalties,_ you told us you… admired his rabidity. That it showed a lack of the kind of mercy and attachment your kind so vehemently abhors.”

“My kind,” Ren repeats quietly. He traces one of the cracks in the tabletop with a gloved fingertip and a ghost of a smile.

The smirks around the room vanish as it becomes so cold the members can see their own breath.

_… he thinks We do not see but We see everything, he thinks We cannot hear but We hear all…_

“The Siths, Supreme Leader,” his chancellor demurs, “with all due respect.”

Ren nods, smiling now with his lips pressed as if not to laugh.

_… black lungs silver tongue ask him about the ship…_

“And when he came to you with my apprentice,” his eyes meet the chancellor’s across the table. The last thing the old man will ever see, “You gave him your unmarked transporter.”

Light flashes off the chancellor’s lenses as he raises his chin. “Now that accusation, I’m afraid, is just plain farce. My lord.”

As Ren cocks his head, the quiet tremors around the room are of an entirely different tone. “That was your lite-craft that damaged my ship and destroyed a hundred others on Alyseaa. If you didn’t give it to him, how did he get it?”

The old man opens his hands to the room at large. “Apparently, he is a criminal mastermind of the first degree.”

“Or, he had access to your personal hanger for months.”

The chancellor threads his fingers together and settles them in his lap. His sneer is gentle, patronizing.

There is _nothing_ Ren despises more than a fatherly tone.

“And why would I allow that?” the chancellor asks, peering again over his glasses.

Slowly, Ren unfolds his arms and braces his hands on the table’s shattered edge, watching his Darkness loop its coils with the only eyes that can see. He is wearing a viper-smile of his own.

“Because you so vehemently abhor my kind.”

“I beg- _gah_ \- _ahk_ ,” the Chancellor gasps viciously and claws at his throat.

“Not hard enough,” Ren’s sneer widens as his Darkness cinches around the other man’s neck.

In the span of a heartbeat, the Chancellor is dead. His face frozen in horror slams into the shattered tabletop, his lenses crack before he loses them as his body topples to the floor.

The men and women sitting around the table sink deep like cornered animals into their tall curved chairs. Hoping the ether will swallow them whole.

“Now,” Ren says softly, meeting every face in the room with eyes glinting malice. He lifts his hand and the pneumatic doors audibly lock.

“Who else helped the General escape?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s middle of the daytime when they land on Arkanis.

Their ship’s so low on fuel her man has to bring them down by hand. They glide slowly over the tops of trees as tall as mountains unfurling forever in all directions until finally they nestle down smoothly into a clearing the color of a rising sun.

Their manger is made of long grass as tall as she, it hushes her shoulder is when they step down the ramp together holding hands. The sky seems farther away from her than on Alyseaa, an overlap of pale and darker greys and silvers all soft as sleep. The grass is a goldful color, smooth stalks that are thread-thin. She lets go of her man’s hand at the base of the ramp and opens her arms and spins slowly, giggling as the grass tickles between her fingers and against her cheeks.

“Where are we?” she chirps.

“Arkanis.”

He’s looking out into the forest that stretches forever towards the sky around the clearing. The trees are dark but not fright-like, taller than anythin’ she’s ever seen in her life.

“No wonder you come from this place-” she pipes, taking his hand again. She is dressed in her tights and surcoat, a small sack of supplies slung around her back. He’s carrying a larger one over his good shoulder, dressed in his officer’s uniform from the day he took her from the base. Beneath his greatcoat, she can see the shape of his blaster in its holster. The hilt of his rapier chimes dully at his hip each time it shifts with his step.

The sight of him in profile, hair smooth and dressed all in black, golden grass wavering around his chest, makes her heartbeat pitter-pat.

She finishes softly, “everythin’ here’s so tall.”

“Is it?” he isn’t watching her, but grid-screen of a handheld scanning device. It blips serenely as he lifts and aims it at the sky.

It feels like he hasn’t really looked at her since they left Alyseaa. Since he found out she lied.

_Should have told him, stupid-_

Guilt niggles coldly at her belly, she turns her hand inside his so that she can thread their fingers and presses herself into his side. “Is ‘e here?”

“Not presently…” he murmurs as he gives the scanner a last long, careful look before looping its long strap around his neck and shoulder so that it slings high across the sack already mounted over his back. “Right, we have a few hours-”

She tries not to flinch as he unholsters his blaster and leaves his thumb on its print reader until the indicator light turns green. “Three, possibly four-”

He hitches his pack higher and slips her a rogueful half-smile that goes straight to her knees. “Off we go, then. Mind your step, my love.”

He guides her carefully through the long grass into the forest, where there is a thick carpet of soft red needles big as his fingers and the underbrush is so thin she can walk with her head tipped back without tripping at all. The breeze that winds through the trees is cool and sharp, sweet with the tastes of damp earth and pine sap. The bowed, reaching boughs of the pines drape a fractured canopy above them, on them she can pick out the bustle of small animals and the nests of birds.

One of the birds lands on a branch slung low above them and lets out a warbling, deep-throated cry. Its call sounds like the mechanical _crick_ of a tiny gear crank, she stops and strains up onto her toes and points with their joined hands.

“Bird.”

“Yes, it’s a warbler,” her man says with his face turned up to it. There’s a ghost of smile on his lips that somehow makes him look sad. “My sister – that is to say, my youngest sister – called them wind-up birds. They reminded her of her turn-key toys.”

“Wait-” she takes his forearm into her empty hand and tilts her head. This is very, very important. “You had a sister before?”

“I did.” His face is still tipped up towards the branches, but his blue eyes are tracing slowly shadows that aren’t really there. “A half-sister. Several, in fact. Before the war.”

A cold wind whispers through the forest, carding his fringe and making the very tops of the tall dark pines dance against the grey skies. She shivers and holds him tighter as his words drip deep into her soul.

She knows nothin’ bout her man, she realizes.

“God I hate this place,” his timber is like the broil of thunder in the distance, low and dark. His eyes still search the forest for something she doesn’t understand.

“Ahm’tage?”

“The sooner we leave here, the better,” finally, he looks down at where she’s clinging to his arm. The closedness in his cool blue gaze makes her tummy twist like the knotted branches of the trees. The breeze still tickles his fringe across his eyes as he says quietly, “Promise me you won’t wander off.”

She glances meaningful at her hands holding him like a lifeline and grumbles, “Can’t get any closer less I climb you, can I?”

“No, I suppose not,” her heart skips pathetically when he cracks a quarter-smile, “Though I’d be lying if I said I would mind.”

“Chht, liar,” she rolls her eyes at the soft red needles on the forest floor and refuses to return his grin, “I ain’t the one who’s been actin’ far-ly. _You_ have.”

His eyebrow quirks beneath his fringe as he turns more fully. “I beg your pardon?”

“You haven’t kissed me one time since we left ‘lyseaa,” her eyes sting. She rolls her ankles out so she’s standing on the sides of her feet and hides behind her lashes as she takes a deep breath and lets him have it with both barrels hot.

“You haven’t sexed me and you don’t wanna talk to me and you don’t want me to help you ‘cept to carry this stupid sack an’ be quiet. I know it’s coz you’re mad about the nano-tracers and me not tellin’ you and whatevah-” she wipes her eyes, _hating_ how pathetical she sounds, “I don’ blame you, really- if you was Plutt you’da beaten me half to deaf for that. But that still don’t mean you can ‘nore me. I’m your wife and I-”  

 _love you,_ she doesn’t get to finish because he cuts her off with his lips.

His kiss takes her to another plane, tongue slipping hot and slick into her mouth making her nipples tighten and ache. She arches her back deep so that their chests can touch, their rucksacks hit the ground behind them as she wraps her arms around his long neck and _moans_ into his mouth.

Their kiss feels nothing like the ones back on Alyseaa, or any of the ones before that. It’s sloppy and love-soused and needful, she’s giving as good as she gets as he swallows up her small body with his big tall one and locks his strong arm carrying his blast-gun into the well of her lower back. He worms his other big paw between them and cups and gropes her breasts through her surcoat as he tongue-fucks her mouth.

Her sex gushes, over the clitter-clatter of her racing heart she hears the sounds of their wet kissing and the cry of the wind-up bird. His hand behind her grips her ass in that hard, hurtful way she loves because it makes her feel so _real_. Her fingers burrow deep and wind themselves in his bright, gloriable hair, she loves him back just as furious, bathing his face and the inside of his mouth with fast flicks of her loth-kitten tongue, marking him.

When they finally peel away their lips gasping, his coat collar is flipped up on one side, top button of his shirt gone missin', lost somewhere in the pine needles by their feet. His eyes are bright and clearful, gaunt cheeks flushed, his soldier-boy hairstyle is completely fucked.

Oh yeah, she’s roughed him up alright. Got him panting and trying to lift her by the cheeks of her ass to rut her against his big bulging cock, neverminding about his torn up shoulder. Her little hand grips him through his slacks and squeezes, first time she’s ever touched his body all on her own, and he _snarls_ like an animal and pulses against her palm as he kisses her again like the Galaxy’s _on fire_.

“Stupid,” she breathes when they break apart panting and she shoves him, grinning like she’s drunk on juniper-gin, “I don’t even like you anyway-”

She squeals laughing when he stumbles back half-a-step then catches himself on her waist and spins them around, reeling her in close with his big hand round her hip and the other sliding up to softly collar her neck.

“Well that’s just too bad,” he rasps, cool and dangerous as a king viper as his thick thumb traces the inside edge of her bottom lip, eyes locked in on her open mouth. Above them, the birds chitter, the wind rocks softly the boughs of the trees. “Because I like you.”

He smothers her smiling sigh in another brutal, tender-long kiss.

He’s her man now, forever.

She ain’t never, never letting him go.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Well-”

Ren turns.

His Captain is wading carefully through the shallow pool of carnage collected on the glossy black tile of his war room, chrome footsteps winding over bodies and through limbs. The wide eyes of his cabinet members and war chiefs watch unseeingly from the floor.

There are no survivors.

Her cool gaze roves the bodies as she settles into her place by his side. “That was quite a show.”

Ren’s chest heaves, he clenches his fists as his Darkness fissures ravening at the air. The room is deathly cold.

“It was _pointless,”_ he snarls, "I tore through every last one of their minds, none of them knew where he’s taken her!”

“True,” she tilts her head, letting her slash of ice blonde hair fall back from her eyes, “but I believe I know where he’s headed next.”

His unsated rage roils, Darkshear lashes above them as his lips peel back over his teeth and the tendons strain in his neck. _“Where?”_

“If Hux wants to start a revolution,” she raises her brows, “he’ll need an army.”

Her implication makes the tension around his eyes go slack. “You think-”

“Yes.”

_Of course._

He lifts his face to the ceiling and lets his eyes fall closed. All around him, the Dark Side smiles, showing off its razoring interlocking teeth. He can already picture her back inside the black cradle of his welcoming arms.

_Rey._

Slowly, the blades of his shoulders draw down his back. “Gather the Knights of Ren.”

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because once you pop, the Siths don't stop ; )
> 
> Buckle up, girls (and Gleeson)


	10. Surely Not *Everybody* Was Kung Fu Fighting...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've updated the tags of this fic to reflect the absolute fuckery that is happening.

They walk nearly three miles through dense woodland before they reach the ramshackle posts and rusted wire that is the boundary of his estate. Beyond it is a field much like the one they landed in, overgrown with long-grass and leading in gentle undulations to a keep in the distance surrounded by crumbling grey stone.

His legacy is in shambles.

A bleak, monotone sky makes a dreary ceiling above them as they walk hand-in-hand to the manor. Overhead, an unkindness of ravens wheels through their slow patterns before settling cawing into the naked branches of the ancient, barren oaks looming like skeletal sentinels at either side of the wall’s high dilapidated irongate.

Lichen and mottled clover overwhelm the cobblestone floor of the manor’s courtyard, the grand fountain in its center he remembers gleaming so magnificently with clear water gurgling up from its founthead and lush with black and orange fish and the lilies his oldest sister so loved now sits idle, silent and festering with algae and rot. Flowerless vines of dark, verdant green have overcome the mansion’s façade of smooth limestone; the lead-paned windows are all shattered, small wrens and whiteflies flutter in and out between the empty casements. At ground level, the great oak and iron entrance stands wide.

“I don’ think anyone lives here,” his wife whispers. She’s holding his hand tightly in hers and peering half-hidden from the grim, towering leer of the manor by his side.

“No.” Sorrow swamps his chest as his eyes trace the high grey stone eaves stained brown by weather and dulse. “Not for some time.”

He sets down his rucksack and holsters his blaster before he goes down on his good knee among the mottle of clover and moss. “My angel-”

From the breast of his greatcoat he produces a small black device.

“It pains me to ask,” he studies it between his fingers as he hedges, “but I’m afraid I need your help-”

“ _Fine-ly_ ,” she steps up and takes his shoulders, mindful of his injured one as she presses their bodies front-to-front. “I want to help you-”

Her bright gaze is quick and beautiful as she beseeches him at double-pace, “and I can do _loads_ of things, ask anyone on Jakku. Even Master Plutt’ll tell you I was ‘is best picker. Ain’t a ship-corpse in his heap I didden pick to deaf. I can learn anythin’, sides-”

“Oh, of that I am thoroughly convinced,” tenderly, he takes her small hips in his big hands to quiet her down. “You’ve mastered me in a single cycle. I pity the task you set your sights on next-”

She snorts, dimples out in force. “Lissen tah you, fuckin’ flatterer.”

He taps the very end of her nose with his fingertip and smirks, “Language, cherished.”

“Yeah yeah, alright,” she drops her lashes and fiddles softly with one flap of his collar, but her dimples still peek around the corners of her mouth as she asks, “So what you want, then?”

He sighs, glancing again at the eerie entrance to the manor, “I do so hate to ask…”

“Spit it out,” her fingers playing with his collar dance tentatively to his lips. She traces their shape, watching herself as softly she scolds, “Ain’t always gotta be so wordful, Tage-pa.”

_Tage-pa._

Despite everything, warmth blooms razor-toothed and rankling inside his chest. He can hardly keep from grinning as he affects contrite. “No, yes of course. You’re quite right, Misses Hux, quite right-”

He holds up the small device between thumb and forefinger for her to see, “This is a list of the raw materials I need to build another electro-neutralizer.”

“That vest-thing, you mean?” her brows furrow and her eyes cross slightly as she considers intensely the device.

“Precisely, the vest-thing. Now I’ve gathered what I could from the last ship, but materials were at a bit of a ration, I’m afraid. These are the items I could not find. Now-”

His hand on her hip jars her just slightly so that she will again look him in the eyes.

“I need you to listen very carefully to what I’m about to say.”

Watching solemnly, she nods.

“The only chance we have of surviving the next attack is if I can rebuild that vest in time-”

She balks, “What you mean _next_ -”

“Shh-shh, listen. Listen to me, angel. There is a shuttle-craft on the estate that can take us to Core, but I doubt very highly it’s in operable condition. Which means I must repair it before we can get off this world-”

 “Why we gotta leave here?” she holds him tighter, presses closer. As if by sheer proximity he can shelter her from the coming storm.

_Oh my darling. How I wish I could._

“You said his search droids aren’t in Regency, that means he can’t find us-”

“I said they are not in this system _at present._ The search drones are on a four-hour cycle-”

“Meaning they’ll come back?”

“Correct. At most, we’re clear of them another-” he glances at the chronometer on his wrist, “two hours. Most likely less.”

Seeing her panic start to swell, he gathers his arms around her waist and holds her against the steady beat of his heart.

“Ren and his Fighters will be here, soon. I don’t have time to repair another ship _and_ procure these items. We must be back in the stars as quickly as we can.”

“But we have to stay together, you said-” she catches his face between her hands and makes their foreheads kiss, her mouth tremors as she tries not to cry, “I don’ want to go separate, you’ll just try to leave me I know you will I know it-”

“No, Rey- I will never leave you. Rey,” his thumbs stroke her cheeks, he pecks softly at her lips as she whimpers and tries to will her calm. “Look at me. I will never, _ever,_ leave you-”

Her small arms wrap tightly about his neck. “Tage I’m scared…”

“I know. But there is one thing you must try to understand. Without his magics, Kylo Ren is an untrained infant with a kyber sword. He is naked to my attack. The next time our paths cross-”

He waits for her to look him directly in his cool, clear eyes. His lips pull back over his teeth with the venom in his measured words.

“I will kill him with the cruelest stroke. But in order to do so, I need to cut off the source of his power. I _need_ that vest. And we _must_ get off Arkanis. We are too much at risk here and I cannot allow that. Will you divide and conquer with me? _Rey._ Will you help me?”

After a beat, she gives him a tremulous nod.

He lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding and closes his eyes, savoring - for just a moment – her trust. 

“There’s a brilliant girl.”

He hands her the device, heart pinching a moment when he sees how much larger it looks in her hand.

_Such a tiny doll…_

Quickly, he shows her a small hologram of each of the items and revels in a wash of relief when she recognizes all but a few. Next, he gives her a brief overview of the manor’s layout, highlighting the rooms he thinks will have the materials she’s searching for. He outfits her in a headlamp and a utility belt loaded down with tools slung low around her slight hips, a surge-gauge to check electrical charges and lastly, his hunting knife.

He slips it into the empty loop at the very front of her belt with a sideways grin. “I trust you know how to use this.”

“Keep laughin’ at me an’ find out,” she lilts her chin, affecting tough, “I picked a thousand ships on Jakku, _thank you_. Kept all them scalpers from grubbin’ my shit and I didn’t need no fancy-boy big knife to do it, neither-”

“No, I suspect you did not,” he stands grunting with hands braced on his thighs.

His knee is throbbing, there’s an answering pounding behind his eyes he ignores as without ceremony he takes her by the waist and lifts her up off her feet.

“Look, over there, there’s a hanger hidden in the long-grass,” he turns them to face west and waits for her to find over the wall the dilapidated ship hanger obscured by overgrowth, “Do you see it?”

She nods, “Yeah.”

“If you hear anything, sense _anything_ , if anything should change at all – that is where I want you to run.”

There’s a hitch in his heart at the mere thought as he sets her back down.

“Where’ll you be?” she pipes anxiously, turning inside the tight circle of his arms.

Their eyes find one another’s as if by magnetism.

“Coming for you.”

The steel skies blow their cool breath across the courtyard, stirring the leaves of the vines into a hushed rustle and making the branches of the barren oaks creak. It sweeps the train of his greatcoat sideways and dances the stray strands of her hair fallen from its braid about her fragile face turned up at his.

“Now, if I finish first I’ll come to collect you. Listen for my signal-”

“But how will I know what it is?”

Gently, he untangles himself and steps outside her reach before he slips the ring finger of each of his hands into his mouth.

His whistle is deafening, it reverberates shrilly off every smooth surface of the courtyard and rings in both their skulls.

“S’loud,” she squints with her nose crinkled and her hands clapped over her ears.

He withdraws his fingers from a smirk. “That’s rather the point.”

Gracefully, he bends to gather their sacks of ship parts and survival supplies. He slings them over his intact shoulder, clear gaze never wavering from her big, beautiful eyes. Then he steps his sharp black boots carefully inside her stance.

Her hands slide up his chest and take of hold of his lapels as he dips closer. The fear in her face splits his spirit to the bone.

 _Stay,_ his gut tells him.

He holds onto her tightly as they kiss long their goodbyes.

“Find whatever you can,” he gives her nose a final, gentle nuzzle. It’s so difficult to leave such sweet surrender, his lips still buzz from their kiss.

When they’re back in the stars, he’ll take her every way he can imagine.

“And _be safe_.”

Her lip trembles as she slips nodding through his fingers. “ ’kay.”

He waits for her to disappear tentatively inside the manor with a last look at him over her shoulder, then turns swiftly to make a start for the hanger before he changes his mind.

 

 

 

 

 

The hanger is a corrugated ramshackle shack.

Double the length of the great courtyard and half the manor’s height, it’s enclosed by tall rust-streaked durasteel on three sides. Its roof slopes, the sidewall nearest him is has caved inward. Its weight has crushed the transparisteel face of the hanger, he finds a ragged opening just large enough for him to slip inside.

The belly of the hanger is dark, lit only by grey light washing in through a small hole in the ceiling left by some sort of blast impact, and through the filthy, filmed-over transparisteel wall. In the launch bay, two basic shuttle-craft designed for civilian commute are docked side-by-side.

The newer model is wedged beneath the weight of the fallen sidewall, turbine crushed beyond repair. The second, an ancient transporter, is grown over with vines and nests of vermin. He sees clearly it’s been stripped down and looted for parts.

He lets his supply sacks fall by his feet where they may and removes his greatcoat before he crouches low and steps under the hull. One look at its exposed underwiring shows him more evidence of theft and wildlife nesting in its tangled, rusted guts.

“Right,” he sighs. “Let’s get on with it.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aboard an Imperial Star Destroyer sluicing slowly through the shivering stars, Kylo Ren kneels in absolute darkness.

His head is bowed, his right arm rests over his right thigh. His black leather fist is loosely clenched.

He is taking communion with the Dark Side.

 _“Where is she?”_ his deep somber voice echoes in the dimensionless space, his black power ripples out through his meditation chamber and into the ether beyond his ship.

The Empire has its minions to search for her.

But so does he.

_We listen, but… she does not speak…_

_“Then call to her,”_ he says softly.

It is not a request.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“C’mon, stupid bastard…” the flat head of Rey’s tool strains wedged inside the seam of a control panel set into a wall. Her teeth grit, she crinkles her nose and flexes the muscle in her arms until they shake. “Lazy cocksuckin’ whore-”

Her tool slips.

She bangs the soft spot of her elbow bad enough on the pneumatic door she’s trying to open that she feels the impact tingle sharply inside her teeth.

“ _Bitch!_ ”

She throws down her screwdriver and snarls and slaps the panel, she kicks the interlocking seam of the doors and screams, “Open up yah stupid piece a’shit!”

On some floor above hers, a bird shrills and flaps its wings in a furious flutter, addled by her shouts echoed through the dark, falling-down rooms of the house.

It’s a creep-place alright, full of spiders and slithers and black corners and bad feelings she can’t quite shake off. She’s still on the main level, a few rooms deep from the open foyer, locked out of the rest by a duel-sided pneumatic fire door twice her size in height and length.

With no power source feeding the lock, she can’t scramble it with a pick-tool. The panels are too heavy and interset for her to pry apart. She thought about using the vines outside to scale the exterior wall to one of the smashed-in windows, but the stalks are fragile and slick and her boots ain’t made for climbing. They’re a stiff, watertight material with a thick solidable sole.

Back on Jakku, she learned she could trick the fire doors on Empire ships to open if she ripped out their control panel and connected the blue fail-wire to the green grounding one. But she can’t get the fuckin’ panel off the wall.

Chest tightening with panic, she starts to breathe faster but then makes herself slow down. “Stop it Rey, you can do it. You can do it. You can…”

She ain’t going back to her man empty-handful. She don’t know much about wifeliness or being marriaged, but she can’t imagine it’s much different than being a slave. And rule number one of slavin’ is-

_Do yer fuckin’ work._

“Alright, you silly bastard,” she puffs her stray hairs from her eyes and rolls her shoulders back. The braids and tauntaun-tails her man likes to put her hair in ain’t worth a piece, but she doesn’t have time to stop and retie it proper-like.

He gave her a list of parts a mile long.

“ ‘kay,” she blows out a breath and shakes up her hands. “You can do this.”

She licks her small lips and closes her eyes.

 _“How you do that?”_ she asked Kylo Ren once, when she was clutched quaking and terror-filled onto his side. Horrified, she watched the dark red fissures of his power fracture the air around them as ahead of them, across the icy tundra of Base One, a gleaming, peace-sleeping white mountain the size of a Great Dune juddered with the black reach of his hand.

The ground cracked and trembled, she was struck deaf by a hurt-filled moan like the heart of the world breaking apart.

Ren laughed at her, his quiet mirthless laugh, and corrected, _“How_ do _you do that, little Dark.”_

He smirked down at her over his shoulder. His dark eyes were lightless despite the light of the far-sun striking blinding off the snow. _“I use the Force.”_

“The Force,” she whispers now, locking her arms by her sides as her fingers try flicking her nerves out.

She _hates_ the Force – she fears it wildly, more than anythin’. It’s evil, she felt it each time it appeared to her in the pitch dark of Ren’s mediation room.

She felt it deep in her gut.

 _“Stop it, stop you’re scarin’ me!”_ she had screamed as the ground beneath them wrenched and groaned like a dying animal. It rolled and ripped itself away from them in racing and ever-widening canyons as Ren’s power shattered the poor beautiful mountain like glass.

“Okay,” her breath shakes. Back inside the mansion, her heart thrashes against her ribs. “Juss this one time.”

Hesitantly, she raises her hand.

 _“What is the Force?”_ she asked Ren.

She flinches as memories surface, memories of the Sith dragging her thrashing and screaming down a hallway by his huge hand fisted in the front of her surcoat or in her hair. To the black room at its dead end radiating coldness. The sounds of her boot soles squealing on the glossy tile and her fingernails raking at his leather armbands as she shrieked, _“No no please no nonono please help me, somebody help-”_

 _“The Force is strength,”_ his bone-white face would loom too close to hers, dark eyes tracing her features remotely as he watched her sob. _“It’s truth. Victory. Let it set you free-”_

Trembling, she plays her fingers and commands, “Open the door.”

Nothing happens.

She keeps her eyes closed and reaches deeper, trying to conjure up that feeling she got in the dark room, like the black movement of a night-slither slipping down a rock.

A fanged smile presses against the shell of her ear when she finds it. _Hello, dear One._

The Dark Side…

She lets its energy coil low and cold in her belly at the same time she pictures the interlocking seam of the door. “H-help me open it.”

_Why, what do you fear?_

Her gut twists but turns warm as the image of door lock crackles away softly and instead she sees the dark, sensual shadow of her man’s body rippling above hers. _Ahm’tage._

_Mm, yes. If you fail him, he will die-_

Images start to kaleidoscope, whirling together behind her flickering lids as the air begins to vibrate around her hand. The white mountain quaking and the interlocking door-teeth and her man’s long, pale body coming home to her again and again.

 _I love him,_ her soul bleats as tightly she holds his ghost between her trembling thighs. Gravity is sliding, she falls into sensation and numbness, wakefulness and sleep. _If he dies, I die too…_

 _“Shh, cherished,”_ her man’s deep whisper slips from his lips down her spine, _“None of that now. Open up.”_

“Open up,” she parrots back to him, just as soft-ful.

A mountain splits silently in the distance.

The pneumatic doors right in front of her glide smoothly apart.

The Darkness winding up inside her smiles as she opens her eyes. _See? Was that so hard?_

She is panting, cold and sweating all over, hand still hanging in the air in front of her juddering with fatigue.

Shrouded in grey, grainy shadow bleeding to thicker dark, a massive central stairwell of hardwood is waiting for her. It leads up and up to the many floors of the house.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

A cold, stale breath sighs rushing through the open fire doors and ruffles her. _You are welcome, little Dark._

She reaches trembling to switch on her headlamp before she steps inside.

 

 

 

 

 

The swelter inside the hanger is unbearable.

Sweat prickles at every pore on Hux’s scalp. It creeps between the hair follicles, individual beads bleeding together to form rivulets of hot, acrid salt that trickle down his forehead into his eyes.

He blinks fiercely against the burn.

Above him, the disemboweled underbelly of the lite-craft bloats towards him, wiring and flex-tubing hanging down like entrails at various connected and free-falling lengths. He is laid on his back atop a single plank balanced on cinderblock, at the end of it a cigarette burns slowly in an ashtray he’s improvised from a can. The sleeves of his uniform shirt are folded carefully up to his elbows, exposing the blue veins cording columns of flexing white muscle in his forearms. Across his chest his shoulder holster is empty, his blastgun sits on a deadened terminal alongside a set of exact tools and his greatcoat.

In his left hand, he holds the craft’s core reactor. The air around it crackles white with volatile potential energy. In his right hand is a length of copper as fine as a strand of hair, no longer than his thumb.

He is winding its ends around pegs the size of rice grain on the core’s induction plate to complete its circuit and power the ship on. If he touches any part of the reactor with the wire while one end is attached to an output peg, he will create a feedback loop of energy which will implode the core.

Its blast would crater the hanger and reduce the adjacent manor to ash.

His breath shakes, but his hands do not.

“Steady, boyo,” he whispers. A drop of sweat trembles on his eyelash. He dare not blink. “Steady… nearly… _there-”_

The hanger is suddenly filled with the hollow hum of the ship’s main power cell igniting as his eyes flood with the icy blue flare of the cabin controls powering on.

_Excellent._

“Andromeda-” he clicks the core reactor back into its protective chamber and listens for the hiss of pressured air that indicates it’s fully docked. From this point, his protocol system can assess the ship’s damage and direct him on its most crucial repairs.

The ship must be able to carry them to the Core worlds.

Above a small transportable terminal connected by an auxiliary cable to the ship’s power cell, a familiar blue sphere appears.

_“Hello. For verification, please state your- voice identification- code.”_

He takes a long, satisfying drag from his cigarette before he calls back through a stream of smoke, “ _Delta-island-nebula-alpha-helix-thirteen-thirty-nine._ General Armitage Hux.”

_“Welcome, Armitage. How may I assist you?”_

“Begin systemic repairs,” he wipes his brow with the folds of his shirt sleeve and stacks his hands still holding his cigarette on the plank above his head with elbows bent to give his arms a rest, “and report back on the status of locating frequency _alpha-nine-nine-oh-two-hundred_.”

The sphere blinks twice and revolves.

_“Current status is- unfound.”_

“Damn.” He sighs.

_“Would you like me to keep searching?”_

“Yes, do.” He closes his eyes. It dulls the blue glare of the uncovered lights above him.

He does his best thinking in the dark.

With no source location for the rebel’s frequency, he does not know to which Core world they should go. They need weapons, supplies, disguises, and shelter. With a bounty on his head of one hundred billion Core credits, his face in hologram will be all over the ground cities and satellite transportation hubs.

He is the most recognizable man in the Galaxy.

But his greatest concern is his wife.

_How to move, where to hide, what to take, when to strike-_

Against the thrum of the healing ship, his mind works at lightspeed, churning through complex algorithms of stratagems and data to compile an answer which satisfies all equations at once.

 _Something is coming,_ his intuition interrupts with its fork-tongued whispers from his gut. _Something is wrong-_

_“Armitage?”_

He opens his eyes. The pulsing leer of the blue light is near-blinding. “Yes...”

_“I have discovered an anomaly while performing advanced analysis on the biological sample of- Rey, of Jakku- submitted on- Prime, Month Seven, twenty-seven AB.”_

“What anomaly?” He turns his head to see better the blue holo-globe hovering above its terminal.

Andromeda distorts, spreading herself into a model that at first he doesn’t understand.

Then the image turns on its axis and sharpens.

His eyes go wide.

“Accelerate the repairs, focus only on critical damages that preclude flight,” he is up, up off the plank and checking the grid-scanner for Imperial drones before the image has a chance to reform into Andromeda’s sphere.

He holsters his blaster. “I want us starborne in twenty minutes!”

He sidesteps swiftly through the narrow break in the transparisteel and breaks into a sprint for the manor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The mansion is a dense maze of dark rooms.

Most of them are pointless, full of smashed-up furnishments and non-tech items. Still, she makes a clean sweep of it, prying open door panels to pilfer power cells and stealing the incandescents from every lamp she can reach. She picks fast, chucks her findings in her sack tied tight over her shoulder, working her rooms back-to-front and east-to-west.

Just like on Jakku.

Occasionally, she finds something she doesn’t expect. A hair comb set with seed pearls and enamel flowers, a man’s reading glasses that make her sight sharper when she puts them on. A beautiful cloth-bodied doll dressed like an angel-bride.

That last one she finds in a room on the west end of the house.

She uses the Force to open its single-panel pneumatic door. A smoke-colored moth the size of her palm flutters up from the floor, passing so close to her face she feels its dust on her cheeks.

Grey light washing in from the arched color-glass windows makes pale, gentle patterns against the floor. It’s a girl’s bedroom, by the looks of it. Dominated by a ruffle bed with its pretty canopy cloth all sagging and torn.

S’the fourth room like it in a row on this floor.

On a dark-wood table beside the bed are trinkets prettier than she’s ever imagined – hairbrushes and treasure boxes and yellowed lace gloves. Among them are a half-dozen small holopictures, kittens in baskets and posies of rose flowers and little girls in long dresses and white satin bows.

But it’s the one dead-middle she can’t take her eyes off of. The one of her man looking sharp and handsomeable in his black officer’s uniform. He’s sitting tall in an armchair surrounded by small girls of different ages. The very bittiest one is posed smug and prettyful in his lap.

_Ahm’tage._

He’s younger than he is now, more proudly. He looks like he’s just had the longest laugh.

Carefully- so carefully- she picks up the holostand and slips it over her shoulder into her pack.

She turns and spots the doll.

It’s tucked lonefully into a play crib at the foot of the big canopy bed. Long yellow hair and satin collar turned a bit grey-ly, but its face is still perfectly bone-white.

Something about it watchin’ her through its pale lashes hurts her too much to let it lie there. She lifts it lovingly from its swaddle as if it were a real babe and tucks it into her chest.

“Hush-a-bye,” she whispers, touching their cheeks and patting its bottom. It’s not like the paper-reed dollies she made for herself back on Jakku. Its weight feels soft but solidable in her arms.

The light inside the room shifts then darkens, as if outside the color-glass window a black hand has swallowed the sky. The temperature of the room plummets suddenly, but she doesn’t notice. A badness has reached through the center of her and closed its cruel fist around her heart.

For the first time since Tage took her from Base One, she’s feels overwhelming despair.

“Shh-shh-shh,” her mouth trembles. Unable to move from her spot inside the bedroom, she rocks her dolly slowly side-to-side, “S’okay, Rey-baby. Don’t cry…”

 _Ahm’tage!_ a part of her conscious is screaming, _Call Ahm’tage now-_

But she can’t call him, not when she knows they’ll never be happy. Because one day he’ll go and leave her all ‘lone-

_“Rey-”_

She hears her name suddenly, its echo rings out like a drop of water dripped onto the still surface of her mind.

The voice is deeper than her man’s. Dark as winter. She’s heard it somewhere before…

_“Can you see my surroundings?”_

Her heart plummets, the bottom of her belly drops out and falls far, far away as she realizes it’s-

She squeezes her baby and clenches her eyes. “You’re not real, go ‘way-”

 _“I can’t see yours,”_ the echoes are growing more intact, more solid real-like with every shaking breath she smothers into her dolly’s long, dusted hair. “Just you.”

_Go ‘way, please, go ‘way go ‘way go ‘way-_

“ _Go ‘way_!” she screeches, then tucks in her lips and shuts up. Her arms squeeze her baby so hard they ache, every bone in her body shakes until it _hurts._

He’s killing her with fear.

“Shh, it’s me, Rey. Don’t be afraid,” his voice – Kylo Ren’s _voice_ – is right behind her. Between her and the door. “Is he with you? Can he hear you?”

Like a sliver of metal pulled to a magnet, he draws out her answer before she can stop him.

“No,” she moans, already sick and spinning on the inside from bad-magic. She claps her hand over her mouth.

_Move run move move run go run run go!_

“Good,” with another wash of sickness, she feels his cold breath seep along her scalp. She senses his hulking bulk bending closer, the Darkness smiles above them with all its venom-tipped fangs. “Now, tell me where you are.”

Her fingers creep trembling towards her belt slung low over her belly. She keeps her eyes screwed tight.

“I’m coming to take you home.”

“I d-don’t wanna go with you-” she chokes on her terror. Her hand juddering so bad finds the textured grip of her man’s hunting knife tucked into her belt. “Go ‘way or h-he’ll kill you-”

“Now Rey,” his big fingers slip over her nape, brushing her hair back. She can _hear_ his hate-smile. “We both know he can’t do that.”

Out of her periphery, she sees his other arm reaching like a slither to wrap around her waist.

Faster than light, she unsheaths her man’s knife and spins.

The blade hilts inside Ren’s belly, low and to the left above his hip. Eyes shock-wide and mouth gaping, he steps back grunting; on pure feral instinct she follows snarling through his motion as she wrenches out her knife. She slashes upwards, putting all the power she has into it as she swipes fiercely cross his defenseless face before he can lift his arms.

Her strike hits bone as it splits him chin to brow, he stumbles howling and clutching the wound streaming red blood down white skin.

“ _You_ … fucking little _bitch_ -” He lashes half-blind and misses, already she’s dodged him and made a mad scramble for the door.

_“Get back here, Rey!”_

She fuck-fumbles screeching out into the hallway, feet tripping ‘cause they’re too scared to know how to run. It’s almost pitch dark, the light supposably coming through the windows blacked out by a strange early night. Her heart pounds, she screams out for her husband-

“ _AHM’TAGE!”_

Chuffing and snarling behind her the Sith makes a long snatch for her shoulder, she feels it miss her by a hair’s breadth as she launches herself into overdrive, juddering the wood floorboards beneath her and kicking back soft huffs of dust.

Ren’s bootsteps make no sound.

_Go Rey go ReygoReygo-_

She’s two floors above the main level and the fire door that seals out the staircase. Dolly still clutched mindlessly in one hand and pack slung across her back rattling with parts, she hits the banister at a dead-run and _leaps._

The fall to the first landing stuns her badly, she slams hard on her side and hears dimly her man’s knife clatter as it falls and spins away. She clambers warbling and panic-blind to her feet, heart beating in her throat and behind her eyes as she totters to the next banister and grips onto it with both hands.

She’s lost track of her doll.

“S’not possible,” she breathes swaying. Ren _shouldn’t be here,_ Tage would’ve warned her, unless he already left her-

She keens, a broken, bleating sound.

_“Rey-”_

That voice doesn’t sound like Ren’s, but she’s reeling, head spinning too bad from the impact and the fear to think as she swallows back vomit and kicks up her foot to make the second jump. Maybe if she can make it through the forest back to the old ship she can-

_“Rey get down!”_

She goes over instead, falling faster than anything but all in slow motion, expecting to hit ground-level with a hard, killing _thud_.

She smacks straight onto her man instead, standing waiting exactly beneath her with his blastgun and open arms. His white face and flame hair and blue eyes rush up to her from the sea of static dark.

_Tage-pa._

He guides her landing more than he catches her, using one strong, corded arm snatched round her waist to slow her trajectory as the other stays pointed up at the stairs. A quick series of rounds from his blastgun roar up the stairwell at the same time he crouches to land her safely into a heap by his boots.

The bright green flashes of acid-light jolt her, she screams and tries to stay hunkered around his calves as he drags her mercilessly up by her forearm to her feet.

“Shh-shh-shh,” he tells her quickly as he moves her behind him, putting himself between her and the Sith.

Her heart thrashes like it’s going to break out of her, she clutches her fists in his dark dress shirt at his shoulders and buries her face in his back.

A seethful silence settles over the manor.

He breathes softly, concentrating intensely with his gun still trained up at the stairwell. Through his back, she hears his steadful heartbeat and feels the even rise and fall of his breath.

Slowly, he backs them towards the entrance of double-paneled fire doors a hundred feet across the narrow foyer, eyes still searching the successive hallways and landings all the way up the stairwell, straining through the darkness striated by sieving grey light.

“Where are you, you bastard,” he murmurs, blast aim tracking with his cool stare.

Her footsteps wobble, she holds onto him for dear life as he continues their backward creep towards the open fire doors, shirking back from the long reach of the shadows cast by the stairs. “He’s not really here, he can’t be-”

“Oh he’s here alright, I can _smell him_ ,” her man growls, still backing them up with aim at the ready, “the stench of incompetent _filth_ -”

_“You’re one to talk.”_

The strike comes not from above them, but to her man’s left.

A black leather fist materializes out of the shadows and hits Tage’s temple _hard._ Ren’s form oozes roaring into the foyer, one half of his diagonally slashed face is drenched in blood.

Her man reels from the first blow too hard to recover in time to block the next one; like a white flash of lightning, Ren follows his vicious punch with a thunderous kick to Tage’s ribs.

She can _hear_ the impact of boot-on-bone as her man is forced back so fast and so far across the dusted hardwood his bootsoles shriek.

Her heart falls through her feet as she screams, _“Ahm’tage!”_

Ren charges roaring and whipping blood before Tage can steady his stance.

He’s an inch from Ren’s crushing reach when he strikes.

The side of his heavy blastgun whips Ren’s orbital bone so hard his head turns; Tage’s fist barreling in from the opposite direction connects with his jaw and cracks back his chin. Ren snarls and lashes back with another vicious punch, but Tage slips under it and delivers a third blow with his blastgun to Ren’s solar plexus has the Sith staggering back hunched and gasping for breath.

“Oh yes, what a _champion,”_ her man smiles at Ren like death.

Ren shoves himself forward roaring, Tage weaves his long, lithe body into the strike and cracks his hard crown up into Ren’s nose.

Ren snorts and brays, “ _Bastard-”_ but in the next split beat of a rabid heart, Tage steps into a kick so violent it _thuds_ where it lands on Ren’s leg and bends it in at a bad angle. A second kick to his chest cuts Ren down to his knees. He rasps for breath just as Tage whirls through his own momentum and connects his boot _brutally_ with Ren’s face.

The Sith goes down spraying blood.

Tage’s firing arm snaps out, the shrill screech of his blaster spitting lightning-fast rounds, but Ren is already gone, smashed and absorbed into the shadows before the speeding lasers slam and disintegrate the floor where he should be.

Tage jerks back his aim and snarls, “What the devil-”

“ _Run!_ ” she screams as on the second landing above them, she sees Ren starting to reform.

Her man pivots and swoops to catch her middle against his shoulder and pushes off growling into a sprint in a move that seems to happen all at once. Her pack slung across her back jangles, she clutches bouncing the back of his shirt and raises her hand-

The nanosecond they are through the fire doors, she slams them closed with the Force.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ren staggers out of his meditation chamber clutching his face in one hand and wheezing for breath. His jaw is dislocated, his sternum is crushed, the coldness of the Dark room still clings to him.

“Sir,” his Captain is waiting for him in the hallway, he sees her startle through his one eye not soaked in blood, “Wha- your _face.”_

He smiles, showing gruesome red between his teeth. “I know where he took her.”

In his hand not holding his face is a porcelain doll.

Its dress is drenched in blood.

 

 

 

 

A breath of cold wind rips howling down from the sky as she and her man burst through the open oak iron doors into the courtyard. He doesn’t stop sprinting as he veers sharply for the gates and crashes them into the faint path he’s already made in the long-grass. She jolts and jars over his shoulder with the impacts of his footfalls, teeth clacking, heart in her throat, and watches the juddering vision of grey light breaking in columns through thick black clouds.

Kylo Ren’s energy is receding; she feels it drawing back like the tide into the night-ocean’s black maw.

But something else is coming.

“Andromeda!” her man bellows when they’re within range of the abandoned hanger, “launch the lite-cruiser on autopilot, trajectory toward incoming craft-”

A sound like the anguished roar of bantha rumbles across the meadow. Out of the side of her jolting vision, she sees the Imperial ship they landed in rising slowly with launch boosters blazing above the trees.

“Ahm’tage, the ship!”

“We need a diversion-” gravel showers pinging through the grass stalks as he slides them to a halt and swings her down from his shoulder.

She scrambles to cling onto him as he shoves them both through the opening in the transparisteel wall.

On the workbench beneath the only working ship, Tage’s scanning device _blips_ urgently.

“S’it the search drones?” she asks ash-faced and hyperbreathing as he herds quickly her up a short narrow ramp into the hull.

“TIE Fighters,” he answers grimly as he compresses the panel that hydrolifts the cabin door.

The ship is a third of the size of their last one, her man has to duck below the curved viewshield of the cockpit to take his seat.

He’s almost talking to himself as he flips the engine switches and snarls through his teeth, “Found us through the _fucking Force,_ did he…”

Guilt burns in her gut.

“Sit in the back where it’s safest,” he orders as his fingers dance rapidly over the ancient control board, picking up speed as he lights up the dash and grinds the ship’s turbines to life.

When she throws down her sack and scrambles into the copilot’s seat beside him, he snarls, “ _Damn it_ Rey that was not a request!”

She’s already fuck-fumbling with the buckles of her harness across her chest with quaking hands as she screeches back, “Shut the _fuck up_ I love you he’s gonna _kill us_ -”

That earns her a meanful sneer as he take the controls in his wide, calm hands and fixes his cold gaze at the dark false-night. “Not in this lifetime, my pet.”

The transparisteel wall before them trembles and peels back groaning into the ceiling to reveal the open grass hedged by forest beyond. Their ship shudders and _burrs_ as it tilts them up on its axis, deafening and vibrating constantly when its thrusters boom to life.

Over it, she hears the far-off scream of the TIE Fighters.

Her man is watching some kind of navigation screen on his side of the dash she can’t see.

“Oh shit Tage,” she strains shaking and teeth chattering over the small distance to cup whatever she can reach of his face, “you’re bleedin’ bad.”

With his left hand he flicks opens a filmed-over plexiplastic cover by his control sticks and hits a red switch as with his right. “It’s not my blood.”

“Tage-”

He catches her wrist and presses her small hand in against his solid, steadiable heartbeat. His face already bloomin’ blue with a contusion under his left eye turns so he can look her deep in the eyes.

“Do I look afraid?” he asks quietly.

Her mouth tremors. She swallows and shakes her head.

“Then why are you?”

Her eyes sting, her chest hurts like it’s split in half.

“I’m not,” she whispers.

One very corner of his lips tick upward. His mouth is so lush and sensual, barely wet at the seam.

“That’s my girl.”

He lets his grip slip and takes the control stick with a steadful ease, like he’s been fightin’ off Siths all his life.

Maybe he has, she thinks as she settles softly back into her seat. Her hand still on his strong forearm holds tight.

Suddenly their old Imperial ship hovering above the treeline swerves and takes off; Tage glances once at the screen she can’t see and she knows, _knows_ the Fighters have come.

But she isn’t scared now.

“Let’s have a countdown, shall we?” Tage hits the switch over their heads that revvs the boosters with a piercing whine and types a set of coordinates into the nav. “Five…”

“Four,” she digs in her fingers, breaths deep and burrows back in her chair, “three…”

In her peripheral, she sees a violent flash of light and then a mushrooming cloud of an explosion followed by the fast-shooting streaks of flaming shrapnel.

Her eyes shut tight. “Two-”

Their hanger judders. The Fighters scream above.

_“One.”_

She grits her teeth grit and bears back at the feeling of her belly dropping out through her feet as they punch out of the hanger and rocket up into the dark, churning sky.

“Making the jump to hyperspeed,” her man’s voice is commanding and calm, loud over the furious rattle of the hull as they soar, “hold on.”

Her hand on his arm squeezes for all she’s worth as their ancient transporter jerks forward then streaks shrieking through the atmosphere to meet the stars.

 

 

Behind them, Arkanis burns.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're having a good time, leave a kudo or comment and lemme know!

**Author's Note:**

> Come frolic with me on Tumblr: https://royramsey.tumblr.com/


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